Denials, deflections and calls for resignation have dominated the headlines in Washington this week, as the Trump White House reels from the revelation that top national security officials discussed military plans in a commercial chat app group that inadvertently included a journalist.
President Trump and several Cabinet officials — including CIA Director John Ratcliffe and national security adviser Mike Waltz — spent Monday and Tuesday insisting the Signal chat was a "glitch" and "mistake" but that it did not contain classified information or detailed war plans.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking to reporters and posting on social media while traveling in the Pacific, remained defiant this week, insisting he did not share "war plans." He criticized journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic editor Waltz had added to the group chat. Goldberg published the chat thread in full Wednesday morning after multiple administration officials insisted the material was not classified. The published texts confirmed Hegseth had sent highly detailed messages about attack timing and weapons used for strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen.
Trump on Wednesday shrugged off the new reporting during a radio interview.
"There weren't details, and there was nothing in there that compromised," Trump said. "And it had no impact on the attack, which was very successful."
The White House on Wednesday worked to aggressively spin the fallout of the published messages, going on the attack against The Atlantic and downplaying the significance of the revelations. In particular, officials seized on a headline description of "attack plans" rather than "war plans," suggesting that slight difference undermined the entire controversy. But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wouldn't rule out potential firings over the Signal leak scandal on Wednesday afternoon.
"The White House is in denial that this was not classified or sensitive data," Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a former Air Force brigadier general and member of the House Armed Services Committee, said on Wednesday. "They should just own up to it and preserve credibility."
▪ The Washington Post: How the Signal transcript undermines key Trump administration claims that the messages weren't "war plans" and testimony from key figures that they didn't recall discussions of weapons or timing.
▪ The Hill: The White House has asked Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to help investigate how Goldberg was included in the chat.
RESIGNATIONS: The new messages move Hegseth to the center of the storm as he seeks to beat back questions about whether he shared confidential military plans and put service members in potential danger. While the White House and its allies on Tuesday and Wednesday sought to downplay the sensitivity of the information shared, Hegseth's deflections and denials are not going over well with current and retired troops and officers, with Democrats and even some on the right.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) took issue at the House hearing with the intelligence officials' assertion that the information in the Signal chat was not classified.
"You all know that's a lie," he said. "It's a lie to the country."
On Capitol Hill, both Waltz and Hegseth are facing growing calls from Democrats for their ouster, as Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, pushes for an inspector general to promptly probe what happened.
"The so-called Secretary of Defense recklessly and casually disclosed highly sensitive war plans," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a letter to Trump on Tuesday, calling for the Pentagon chief to be "fired immediately."
▪ The New York Times: Did Hegseth send a war plan or battle plan? Was it classified or not? The answers to those questions amount to a distinction without much of a difference.
▪ The Hill: Trump says he will ask Hegseth, who is traveling, to review if military flight times should be classified. "I'd certainly ask him to take a look."
▪ The Hill: Gabbard called it a "mistake" that Goldberg was added to the Signal group chat, but denied sending classified messages.
▪ Der Spiegel: Trump's most important security advisers used Signal to discuss an imminent military strike. Reporting has found that the contact data of some of those officials, including cell phone numbers, is freely accessible on the internet.
LEGAL CHALLENGES: Five Cabinet members are facing a federal lawsuit over the chat, brought by government watchdog group American Oversight, which argues that the administration officials violated the law through the "unlawful destruction of federal records" after the Signal chats were set to disappear after a certain number of weeks.
The lawsuit — which names Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the National Archives as defendants — asks a federal judge to declare the use of Signal unlawful and order the Cabinet members to preserve the records immediately.
The case has been randomly assigned to U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who's found himself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration for overseeing the case of the deportation of alleged gang members to Venezuela.
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