US Officials Face Questions Over Security Breach
On Tuesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and the National Coordinator of Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding a significant security breach. Both are alleged to have been members of a chat group on the commercial messenger “Signal”, where high-ranking US government officials discussed detailed plans for attacks on the Huthi in Yemen and accidentally added the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the group.
Gabbard and Ratcliffe told the Senate hearing that no classified material was exchanged in the Signal chat group.
However, Democratic Senators expressed skepticism about this claim, pointing out that Goldberg, who had joined the chat group, reported that US Defense Minister Pete Hegseth had published operational details of upcoming attacks on the Huthi in Yemen, including information on targets, weapons used by the US and the sequence of attacks.
The leading Democrat on the committee, Mark Warner, made his critical stance on the incident clear in his opening remarks. Every officer of the military and intelligence services, he said, would be fired for such a careless behavior. The Trump administration, he added, handles classified information “carelessly, sloppily and incompetently”.
A former US official told Reuters that operational details for military actions are typically classified and only known to a few people in the Pentagon. Such highly classified information is usually stored on computers that use a separate network, the official said. Earlier, President Donald Trump had spoken out in support of his national security advisor, Michael Waltz, who had accidentally been added to the Signal discussion by Goldberg.
Waltz took full responsibility for the incident on Tuesday, saying, “I take full responsibility”. In his first interview since the incident, Waltz told Fox News.
The White House released a further statement on Tuesday, in which it said the Trump administration had “paid the Huthi terrorists back”. “Democrats and their media allies seem to have forgotten that Donald Trump and his national security team have successfully killed terrorists, attacked US soldiers and disrupted the world’s most important shipping routes”, the statement read.