The White House on Tuesday brushed off the seriousness of mistakenly adding a journalist to a group chat with senior national security officials in which they discussed details of a military attack on Yemen.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that war plans were discussed in the chat, even though the White House had previously appeared to confirm the account that the journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, gave in an article for The Atlantic the day before.
“1. No “war plans” were discussed. 2. No classified material was sent to the thread,” Ms. Leavitt said in a post on social media as she attacked Mr. Goldberg. Several Defense Department officials have expressed shock over the inclusion of such sensitive information in a chat group on a commercial app.
The article in The Atlantic said the chat included “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
The extraordinary breach of American national security intelligence has led Democrats to call for the resignation of the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who set up the group chat, and the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who reportedly shared classified war plans in it.
It has also frustrated some Republicans. Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska and a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters that the White House should “be honest and own up” to putting classified information on an unclassified system.
“It’s a fact,” Mr. Bacon said. “Classified information was put out by the secretary of defense. It’s pretty clear,” he said.
In an article published on Monday, Mr. Goldberg wrote that he was mistakenly added to the group on Signal by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser. The group also included Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Mr. Goldberg wrote that on Saturday, two hours before U.S. strikes on Houthis in Yemen, Mr. Hegseth posted operational details in the chat. Mr. Goldberg did not directly quote or post a screenshot of that update because it “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel,” he wrote. He did post screenshots of other parts of the conversation with the senior officials.
On Monday, the National Security Council appeared to confirm the authenticity of the chat.
“At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” said Brian Hughes, the National Security Council spokesman.
After the report was published on Monday, Mr. Hegseth denied war plans were shared in the group chat, prompting Mr. Goldberg to tell CNN that Mr. Hegseth was lying.