Gabbard suggested the chat was merely a policy discussion rather than a meaningful insight into U.S. military operations.
Democratic members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence grilled Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe during an open hearing on March 26 over their handling of a Signal chat that described an ongoing U.S. military operation and was inadvertently shared with a journalist.
Congressional ire stemmed from the publication of a March 24 article in The Atlantic in which the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that national security adviser Mike Waltz added him to a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal.
That chat included Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, special envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff, Gen. Michael Kurilla, Vice President JD Vance, and others.
In it, the officials discussed an upcoming and then ongoing military operation against Houthi targets in Yemen, according to Goldberg’s account.
Goldberg claimed that members of the group continued to discuss details of the unfolding military operation while he was on the chat, despite not knowing who he was.
Texts shared throughout the operation included updates on operational security; local weather conditions in Yemen; the timing and sequence of attacks to be conducted; the specific types of weapons platforms to be used, including F-18 fighter jets, MQ-9 Reaper drones, and sea-launched Tomahawk missiles; and an informal assessment of damage to one of the buildings struck in the attack.
Intelligence Committee Democrats expressed anger and disbelief that such operational details would have been shared with a journalist in the chat and that the leak could have placed U.S. service members at risk.
Intelligence leaders had pushed back on that idea on March 25 during a similar hearing with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, when Ratcliffe said that his communications on the chat “were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) took issue with that characterization on March 25, saying the information included in the chat should have been classified according to current U.S. policy and that intelligence leaders’ suggestions to the contrary were misleading.
