Trump Team’s Signal chat exposes Yemen strike details
Washington (MNTV) – In an extraordinary twist that’s rocked President Donald Trump administration, The Atlantic has published a new trove of Signal messages involving top security advisers.
The Atlantic magazine on Wednesday released a set of group chat messages that laid bare how senior Trump officials casually discussed sensitive operational plans for U.S. strikes in Yemen over Signal, a supposedly secure but non-governmental messaging app.
Among the participants were CIA Director John Ratcliffe, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth. Special envoy Steve Witkoff, who was in Russia at the time, also contributed to the exchange.
The conversation included alarming levels of detail: timing of attacks, weather assessments, specific weaponry, targeting instructions, and even confirmation of a successful kill—sprinkled with emojis.
According to The Atlantic, this kind of information, if exposed to adversaries or even carelessly reposted, could have allowed Houthi militants to prepare for an imminent strike, placing American pilots at grave risk.
The magazine’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg had originally been added to the chat by mistake and recused himself until ethical concerns and Trump officials’ public denials forced a reconsideration.
The revelations have triggered bipartisan concern over national security, information security protocols, and the Trump team’s continued claim that no “classified” information was shared.
Signal, a widely used encrypted messaging app, has recently come under scrutiny within U.S. defence circles.
Just last week, NPR reported that the Pentagon warned its personnel against using Signal due to security vulnerabilities, highlighting the risks of interception by foreign actors, including Russian hackers.
An official Pentagon bulletin dated March 18 specifically urged staff to avoid the app. This heightens the stakes of the White House group chat leak, which included sensitive tactical content not intended for public view.
Trump allies repeatedly insisted the chat didn’t involve classified information. Pentagon chief Hegseth even claimed “nobody was texting war plans.” However, The Atlantic’s latest release contradicts those assertions, showing what experts are calling “clear operational intelligence.”
The White House responded with mixed messages. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted the texts were not classified, but also urged the media not to publish them.
“As the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation,” she wrote in an email to The Atlantic.
President Trump downplayed the episode as “the only glitch in two months,” while online surrogates labelled the article a “hoax” and denied the messages involved real-time war planning. “NO WAR PLANS,” wrote one of Trump’s defenders on X, formerly Twitter.
Yet as critics point out, the distinction between “classified” and “sensitive operational” data is often academic.
The Federal Records Act mandates that government communications be preserved for at least two years, while the Signal messages were reportedly set to auto-delete within weeks.
Democrats have pressed the issue during the House Intelligence Committee hearing. Both Gabbard and Ratcliffe—present in the chat—testified before the committee. Lawmakers questioned how such discussions weren’t considered “classified” and why the administration continued using an insecure app against direct Pentagon advice.
The Atlantic said it withheld only one name at the request of national security officials but published the rest unredacted.
“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels,” the magazine said, “especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages.”
This latest controversy adds to mounting scrutiny of Trump-era national security practices and raises broader questions about secure communication protocols at the highest levels of American government.
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