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The fact that the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, found himself included in a Signal chat among President Donald Trump’s top officials, who were discussing the details of an upcoming U.S. military attack on Houthi militias in Yemen, is an even bigger calamity than it may have seemed at first disclosure.
It’s a bigger calamity as a security breach, as a case study in slipshod decisionmaking, as an evasion of responsibility (in the way the act was subsequently shrugged off), and—very likely—as an aggravation of the transgressive impulses that have tarnished America’s reputation as a reliable ally, or a reasonably stable world power, in the mere two months since Trump returned to the White House.
First, and most jaw-dropping, is that this conversation—involving Vice President J.D. Vance, national security adviser Mike Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and 14 others—took place over a commercial chat channel.
Signal, which relies on end-to-end encryption, is more secure than most chat apps, but it is far from impenetrable. In any case, conversations about attack plans generally take place in person, in a room—in the White House, the Pentagon, or some other scrubbed facility—where participants are not allowed to bring in cellphones (because, even inside such facilities, phones can be hacked). Those who can’t make it to the meeting—such as Hegseth, who was in Asia at the time, or Vance, who was in Michigan—usually take part via highly classified communications systems far more secure than the likes of Signal.
So how serious was this Signal conversation as a security violation? First, let’s compare it with the Republican Party’s blue-chip example of a security violation: Hillary Clinton’s sending and receiving classified information through her personal cellphone while she was Barack Obama’s secretary of state. “Hillary’s email” became the rallying cry for GOP activists—one of the dangerous offenses for which the FBI should “lock her up”—during the 2016 presidential race between her and Trump.
The Trump team’s Signal chat contained information that was about as “top secret” and timely as one can imagine. Back in 2016, the FBI examined 30,000 emails that Clinton turned over and found that 110 of them—the back-and-forth of 52 email chains—contained classified information. Of those, just eight had material that agents claimed she should have known was “top secret.” (Only 36 had “secret” info; eight had “confidential” info.)
Seven of those eight top-secret emails discussed CIA drone strikes, mainly on Pakistan and Yemen. Unlike military drone strikes (which are public), CIA drone strikes are by nature top secret (because they occur in areas where the U.S. is not at war), but Clinton and her aides were discussing the day’s newspaper stories about those strikes. In other words, those getting hit by the drones already knew about them; if foreign agents were listening in, they wouldn’t have learned anything that wasn’t out there. The other email discussed a phone conversation with the prime minister of Malawi; at least at the time, chats with foreign leaders were by nature top secret.
A little later, but still before the election, the FBI scrounged through bits and pieces of 30,000 more emails that, for whatever reason, Clinton did not turn over. They found three—three—that contained classified information: one secret, two confidential.
And that’s it. Nothing about ongoing or upcoming military campaigns or any other sorts of operations, the disclosure of which could have significantly damaged U.S. security. And yet those emails—the subject of three front-page stories in one issue of the New York Times, among many others—may well have cost Clinton the election. Trump referred to them many times as serious leaks that should disqualify her from the presidency.
But a major military attack scheduled to take place in a matter of hours, described and discussed in detail over a commercial app—that’s just a mistake by a good man. A few in the GOP couldn’t let it go quite that easily. Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska, a retired one-star general in Air Force intelligence, called the incident “embarrassing” and “wrong,” explaining, “You don’t put classified information on unclassified devices like Signal. And there’s no doubt—I’m an intelligence guy—Russia and China are monitoring both their phones, right? So putting out classified information like that endangers our forces. … It’s just wrong.”
Were Russia and China, or any other foreign powers, monitoring this chat? We may never know, but it’s possible. One official on the line, Steve Witkoff—Trump’s longtime real-estate friend and now his emissary to peace talks with Russia, Ukraine, and various countries in the Middle East—was in Moscow at the time. It’s a fair bet that Russian hackers were deeply inside his phone—and, therefore, in all the others.
If the Russians were listening, they could have passed on the intel to their allies in Iran, who could have in turn supplied it to the Houthi militias, which they arm. Or the transactions could as yet take place, for future reference and favors.
What about the rest of the world, which is watching all this very closely? Leaders of many U.S.–allied countries were already worried about whether they could share secrets with U.S. intelligence agencies headed by the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, who avidly parrots Kremlin propaganda points. Now it seems even Waltz—one of the few seemingly professional stalwarts in Trump’s senior entourage—is careless with secrets. And Trump, who has his own record of mishandling highly classified documents, doesn’t seem to mind.
Then there was one hair-raising exchange during the chat, as Goldberg transcribes it. Vance voiced opposition to attacking the Houthis just because they’re threatening to endanger shipping in the region. “I think we are making a mistake,” he wrote. Just “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does.” Later on, he noted: “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” Hegseth replied three minutes later, “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But … we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this.”
Well, at least the SecDef got that right, and Vance was wrong in another way: About 20 percent of all global shipping goes through the Suez route that the Houthis have attacked many times. That affects U.S. prices and security as much as almost any other country.
Still, many Europeans (and some key Asians too) would have noticed that, behind their backs—despite their efforts to massage Trump’s ego, and their very real massive increases in defense spending—the vice president and secretary of defense are still dissing America’s key allies.
The allies still need the U.S. for security and much else. But the strain on those alliances is building by the day: Vance and Elon Musk have thrown their rhetorical support behind Germany’s most far-right-wing party; Trump has had kind words for Putin while he’s slammed Canadians as “nasty.” And second lady Usha Vance will be taking a trip to Greenland this week, a visit the White House has billed as a friendly form of soft diplomacy but which most of the locals can’t help but view as a reconnaissance expedition, given Trump’s repeated determination to “get” the large icy landmass “one way or another.” In the context of all this, allies can reasonably look at the Signal chat as another indication that it’s time to start cutting ties with Washington and start binding ties with one another.
