Trump Advisers Debate the Houthi Strikes... on the Signal Chat App?
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Top presidential advisers, including Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, are accused of holding sensitive discussions and even sharing U.S. war plans over the commercial chat app Signal after they loop in a Washington journalist apparently by accident.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my colleagues on the editorial board, Elliot Kaufman and Kate Batchelder-Odell. Beginning on March 15th, American forces, including from the USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier, made a series of strikes on the Houthi forces in Yemen who have been menacing the Red Sea, slowing global trade.

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said at the time that the attacks had been successful, hitting Houthi leadership, killing key leaders, infrastructure, hitting missiles. But on Monday, the editor of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote that he had received advance notice of what was about to happen, apparently by mistake, after he was included in a signal chat group saying,

with other users, including Michael Waltz, a user called Pete Hegseth, a Signal user identified as J.D. Vance. A spokesman for the National Security Council told Goldberg this appears to be an authentic message chain. Here is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responding on Monday. I've heard I was characterized. Nobody.

was texting war plans. And that's all I have to say about that. Thank you. And here's Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg responding to that on MSNBC. I'm going to be responsible here and not disclose the things that I read and saw. I will describe them to you. The specific time of a future attack

Specific targets, including human targets, meant to be killed in that attack. Weapons systems, even weather reports that the government is--I don't know why HECSAC was sharing it with everybody. I mean, the precise detail. And then a long section on sequencing. This is going to happen. Then that is going to happen.

After that happens, this happens. Then that happens. And then we go and find out if it worked. I mean, you know, he can say that it wasn't a war plan, but it was a it was a

minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen, organized by CENTCOM, Central Command, which is the military oversight group of the Middle East, the broader Middle East. This is their plan. And he was taking their plan and sharing it with

bunch of civilian leaders. Elliot, what seems to have happened here? And is there much doubt at this point that this was a real chat by U.S. officials? Part of Jeffrey Goldberg's story written in The Atlantic is that he at first thought that somebody was pulling his leg. It was maybe some sort of attempt to trick him and loop him into something as a journalist that he would write and embarrass himself. And so then he was waiting for the news of the bombs falling in Yemen. Right. So he saw there that

the attacks will happen two hours from now and figured, well, if the attacks don't happen, I guess someone is trying to trick me here. And then the bombs fell on Yemen two hours later.

And to hear him tell it, he almost couldn't believe what was going on. Do we know that this was inaccurate group chat? Well, it seems to have got that right. In his telling, it seems to have got a lot more than that right as well. The White House confirmed it. National Security Council more or less confirmed it, I would say. In fact, the NSC tried to spin what was happening, saying that

The messages not only seem to be authentic, but they actually show how thoughtful the discussions that senior Trump administration officials are having on the issues of the day. That may be so, but it probably shouldn't be happening on a commercial messaging app like Signal, and it probably definitely should not be happening with a journalist online.

on the chain accidentally.

The Journal's editorial is under the headline today, What the Trump War Plan Chat Reveals. What's your read of the debate inside the White House about these strikes on the Houthis? It played out.

the way you might expect it to play out. And by that, I mean that the public's perception of where some of Trump's principal national security advisors are on the issues turns out to be quite accurate. Mike Waltz, I think, was the strongest defender of the president's decision to strike the Houthis, who have attacked U.S. Navy ships and have been shutting down commercial shipping. And then you had

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, who was also supportive of these strikes and for two reasons said, hey, you know, it's a vital interest, freedom of navigation on the seas and trade being able to move freely. And two, we need to reestablish deterrence that the Biden administration let lapse and

by just allowing missiles to fly in the Red Sea and U.S. Navy ships having to basically catch them and try to knock down each one with air defense missiles. But I think the most lasting effect of this story will be the substance of what the vice president had to say. He said that, and I'm paraphrasing here, but that he thought that striking the Houthis in Yemen would be at odds with the message that Trump wants to send the Europeans.

and that this is really more the Europeans' problem. It's really more their problem about having shipping held up in the Red Sea.

That, I think, will be what counts in this story because it revealed two distinct things, one of which is that Vance really is quite hostile to the Europeans. And he treats them with a rhetoric that he does not apply even to America's adversaries like Russia, for instance, who we're always hearing is, you know, maybe misunderstood, Putin's misunderstood. So he really does harbor some hostility toward the Europeans there.

But second, real quick, it is odd to see a vice president this way, freestyling on a group chat about what the president of the United States has decided he's going to do. He said, I don't think the president understands how at odds this is with his Europe agenda. And so I do think there is potentially a delta of views between the president and the vice president. That's significant. And I do wonder if the president is disappointed to find out that his vice president is

potentially undermining a decision he's already made in a group chat. To dig in on that point, this was the beginning of the group chat from the Signal user Michael Waltz. It says, team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the president's guidance. And then one of the messages subsequently by J.D. Vance, that user was, I think we are making a mistake. And so, Elliot, it does raise the question of the differing views seemingly between President Trump and

J.D. Vance taking a more skeptical view toward U.S., exerting U.S. power abroad. And it also fits, I think, with what we have seen in the past of J.D. Vance's views, including, if you read it that way, the blowup in that meeting where

with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, where one way to view what happened there is that Trump really wanted that minerals deal. He wanted that signed that day. And it was the goading of Vice President J.D. Vance that turned that meeting into the ugly spectacle that it became. I think that's a fair reading. I mean, Vance certainly made that blow up worse than it had to be on any reading. And you know what? I mean, I think it's worth underscoring

President Trump made a policy decision here. He gave out the orders. Stephen Miller says on the group chat, as I heard it, the president was very clear, green light for the strikes on the Houthis. And so what happens following? Mike Waltz, Pete Hegseth talk about how to implement President Trump's directive and

J.D. Vance tries to back away from that and look at all sorts of reasons why the U.S. might want to do it. And, you know, throughout a number of them, none of them totally make sense on their own. A sense that, well, European trade is hit more than American trade. American trade is hit pretty hard. And, by the way, raw materials going to...

Europe are used in all kinds of goods that are then sold to America. So it's not that simple. Another reason he offered was economic news. Maybe we should wait until U.S. economic news is better. Well, that might not happen. It sounded like a way to push off the president's policy until some other day that may never come. Hang tight. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. Then let's turn to the security implications of this. There were more than a handful of people on this signal thread. One of them was the Ukraine envoy, Steve Witkoff. And Kate, some of the reporting from CBS, this is their line that Steve Witkoff was in Moscow. He was there meeting with Russia's President Vladimir Putin when he was added to the

to this group chat, which really raises the concerns, the questions about whether this kind of chat through this commercial app signal could have been intercepted and potentially decoded by Russian security services. Right. I mean, let me step back for a second and say that I do think

The media headlines and panic surrounding this story is very self-serving and was not present when Hillary Clinton was setting up a server at her own house. So I do dislike that pearl clutching about the security of this text chain at some level. But at the same time, there are legitimate security questions here that need to be answered.

which is what exactly was Pete Hexa texting to this group chat? Was it classified information? I think Goldberg has made a responsible decision in not publishing that information. But the White House has come back and said that there's no classified information in the thread. But that's hard to square because Goldberg, as Elliot was saying, sits in his car and waits to see if the bombs start falling.

And we know that something as sensitive as where the U.S. military is going to strike and when and who it's going to target, we know those would be secrets. Those would be closely held secrets. And we don't want those being discussed on commercial apps. I mean, it just comes to mind, the basics of this is that, like you said about aviators off the USS Truman are conducting some of these strikes.

The Houthis are a capable group. They have surface-to-air missiles. They shot one at an F-16. All I'm saying is we're putting Americans in harm's way potentially to carry out these strikes, and we certainly wouldn't want a leak to happen and give the enemy warning of what was coming. So I do think there's substance there, but clearly I think these officials are going to learn their lesson and not keep running their mouth on a signal chat about what's going on in the Middle East.

On the question about whether there was classified information shared on the Signal thread, as it happens, a couple of the reported participants are up on Capitol Hill today testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Let's listen to Senator Angus King asking Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard about this chain. Open source reporting at 1144 on the morning of November.

March 15th, Secretary Hedseff put into this group text a detailed operation plan including targets, the weapons we were going to be using, attack sequences and timing. And yet you've testified that nothing in that chain was classified. Wouldn't that be classified? What if that had been made public that morning before the attack took place?

Senator, I can attest to the fact that there were no classified or intelligence equities that were included in that chat group at any time. So the attack sequencing and timing and weapons and targets you don't consider to should have been classified? I defer to the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council on that question.

Well, you're the head of the intelligence community. You're supposed to know about classifications. So your testimony very clearly today is that nothing was in that set of texts that were classified. I'll follow up on Senator Wyden's question if that's the case.

please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion. This is a similar statement by John Ratcliffe in the same hearing. He said, my communications, to be clear, in a signal message group

were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information. And Elliot, I guess we'll find out if that is a carefully hedged statement by the CIA director saying my communications did not include any classified information. But the other part of this question on security that it raises, I think, is whether this has been

the Trump administration, M.O., broadly. And as far as we know from the Atlantic editor, when he was added to this text chain, there was no explanation of what was going on here and what was supposed to be shared. It was just a, hey, we're setting up this new Houthi text chain. So are there other signal chains about Taiwan or Iran or Israel or Ukraine where these principals have been sharing similar information? He also didn't say that anyone had raised any...

objections about it. It seems that nobody did. And the concern here isn't so much that Signal has been hacked, although as a commercial messaging app, we really don't know, which is why we like to use secure communications for these sorts of things.

But it's about individuals' phones. If you are using a phone that is not set aside for classified purposes, classified information, you are putting everything at risk. I mean, Witkoff in Moscow, if that phone is ever connected to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, something like that, you're asking for the Russians to have everything on it.

And so incredibly irresponsible. I think there are going to be a lot of hard questions from Democrats, yes, but Republicans should be asking too. Hang tight. We'll be right back after one more break. Okay, business leaders, are you here to play or are you playing to win? If you're in it to win, meet your next MVP. NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is your full game.

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Welcome back. Kate, why do you think that officials would use Signal in this fashion? I mean, there's a reference in these chains to the high side, referring to the classified secure communications networks that youth officials are supposed to use when they're discussing classified information. I mean, is it just the ease of using your cell phones? Everybody's used to texting and chatting and signaling these days, and they fall into that habit? Or what's going on here? Well, I think that's an important distinction to make.

because we did see Mike Waltz on the thread based on what we know from Goldberg. We did see Mike Waltz direct people to check out the classified stuff in their inbox, which is the appropriate way of handling the information. So Mike Waltz is getting a lot of attention being potentially the one who added Jeff Goldberg to the chat. And I think that's undue. And it looks like he behaved how we want U.S. officials to behave in the chat and that it was others who were potentially sharing things that should not be shared.

I think they're using this because it is easy to communicate this way as just one basic reason. I think getting to a place where you can look at classified information in a SCIF, getting people of this stature together in large groups, I'm sure that is scheduling-wise very difficult.

It may be that we do need more seamless classified communications, but a lot of the reasons why it's difficult to access is because we want to keep it impenetrable. So I think convenience plays a big part of that, of why they were using this app, and they just assumed that...

there wouldn't be a liberal journalist that they don't like listening in on it. What about the question of accountability here? President Trump on Tuesday said this, "Michael Waltz has learned a lesson and he's a good man," unquote. And on one hand, as far as we know, Elliott, Waltz was the one who initiated this chain, seems to have added Jeffrey Goldberg by the initials JG, not realizing

maybe intending to add somebody else. And then Ratcliffe, the CIA director in this hearing again, was making the argument that signal is an approved messaging method for work communications. If you're not doing anything classified, setting up meetings, coordinating stuff like that, he was arguing is fine.

as long as you memorialize those decisions in a separate fashion, because signal messages can be disappeared, set to erase, self-erase after a certain period of time. And he was saying that at least in his shop, that was done. So there was no open records or Freedom of Information Act concerns on his end.

As far as the accountability goes, Trump, again, saying he stands by Mike Waltz. And Mike Waltz is one of the guys who, in this thread, was making the argument that only the United States can ensure the freedom of the seas, freedom of navigation. So if you're someone who agrees with that position, throwing him over the side here is not necessarily a good outcome. That's right. I mean, if you're looking backward, you can say it's a punishable offense. If you're looking forward, I think the president might say...

Mike Waltz was loyal. He took my instructions and tried to carry them out and made the case for them when others pushed the other way. So one thing I would say is that the Trump administration

doesn't embarrass easily, for better or for worse. Some would say it's a strength. They can't be pushed around by the media in the same way. Some would say it's a weakness. But the media is going to try, is going to push at them, because there were real mistakes made here.

President Trump might just look past it and say, well, he's not going to do that one again. And probably he won't, to be honest. And what about Pete Hegseth? I mean, if he really, Kate, was sharing classified information on this thread, you'd think that the Trump administration would have a serious problem with that. On the other hand, Hegseth is also a Trump loyalist, was arguing the Trump administration line on this, pushing back.

against the vice president. And getting a new defense secretary in would restart the Senate confirmation process. It's not clear that there's any advantage for the Trump administration there. And then what about the legal issue? I mean, people can remember other instances of lower level office.

officers or even high-level officers, former General David Petraeus, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for mishandling classified information. And I guess we still don't know exactly what was in these threads. But if these attack plans were as treated as cavalierly by the top-level officers as they appear to have been, or according to Jeffrey Goldberg, they were, I mean, that's a terrible message to send to the

lower-level officers down the Pentagon chain who are really required to abide by these security rules on classified information. It's not a good message. And like I was saying earlier, there are Americans that go into harm's way to carry out these strikes. And so we want to protect them. So, look, I think it's substantive. But

I think what the case that the administration is trying to press on Capitol Hill today in the hearing is essentially – and there's a lot of dissembling going on, but I think read between the lines of what they're trying to say is basically that Hegseth has broad authority to decide what is classified.

And that is how they're trying to reconcile what Goldberg is saying with the idea that there was nothing classified in the chat. I don't find that necessarily a compelling argument. But at the same time, that is a difference with what some lower level officials do when they are leaking classified information. I take that point.

I don't think it is going to be productive to, as you say, throw him over the side for this either, because you would need a Senate-confirmed replacement. That restarts an entirely new process. And there are really substantive issues at the Department of Defense that we need somebody to deal with. You've got a big budget fight coming on, especially. So I don't think the administration is going to do that. And I think, to Elliot's point,

They're impervious to embarrassment, which is sometimes useful. And in this case, I think Mike Johnson was the Speaker of the House when he said, look, they made a mistake. They're going to tighten it up. I think that is essentially where this goes. Thank you, Kate and Elliot. Thank you all for listening. You can email us your own top secret information at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch.

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