5 Key Questions About Signalgate

Heads are still spinning in Washington in the wake of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s bombshell report in the Atlantic that he was accidentally included in a group chat on Signal with the senior-most national security officials in the Trump administration as they discussed impending U.S. strikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Despite two members of the group chat, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, having been grilled on the matter by senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, numerous questions remain about how this shocking national security breach happened and what it all means for the people involved as well as for the country more broadly.

Here are five big questions we still have about this escalating scandal.

1. How did Goldberg get added to the group chat in the first place?

This remains perhaps the biggest mystery of all.

Goldberg wrote that U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz sent him the initial connection request on Signal—a feature that allows the platform’s users to control who is able to communicate with them—which Goldberg accepted, “hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.”

Goldberg said that two days later, he received a notice on Signal that he had been added to a group chat called the “Houthi PC small group.”

The White House has said it’s reviewing how Goldberg was inadvertently added to the chain, but so far no officials have offered an explanation. When asked during Tuesday’s committee hearing about it, Ratcliffe said he did not know how Goldberg was invited to join the chat and that he had seen “conflicting reports” about who had invited the journalist, despite Goldberg having said unequivocally that it was Waltz.

Goldberg also reported that he eventually left the chat after determining that it was genuine. When someone leaves a group on Signal, the group’s creator is notified. But Goldberg said no one reached out to him after he departed the chat. It’s unclear if Waltz did not notice Goldberg leaving or simply chose not to react.

2. Why did none of the officials in the chat, which occurred over several days, raise concerns about Signal being an inappropriate way to communicate about sensitive national security information?

In addition to the U.S. national security advisor, CIA director, and director of national intelligence, officials in the group reportedly included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, among several others.

Many of these people have significant experience dealing with classified national security information and should have known better than to discuss details about impending U.S. military operations over Signal (and with a journalist on the group chat). Rubio was a U.S. senator who was a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Gabbard is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and as a member of Congress served on the House Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs committees. Ratcliffe was director of national intelligence during President Donald Trump’s first term.

A number of the officials in the chat have also made public statements in the past on the importance of operational security and avoiding using unsecured channels that could compromise sensitive national security information—often in relation to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as the top U.S. diplomat.

Waltz touched on the Clinton email scandal in a 2023 post on Twitter (now X). “Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing,” Waltz said at the time while sharing a 2016 Politico report regarding Sullivan’s connection to the Clinton email scandal.

Hegseth has also repeatedly criticized Democrats, including Clinton, in relation to their handling of classified information. “If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now,” Hegseth said in 2016.

In other words, the officials involved appear to be fully aware of the laws surrounding sharing sensitive information and the potential for unsecured platforms to be compromised, but they still went forward with using Signal to discuss an upcoming U.S. military operation. Why none of them raised concerns as the chat remained active over the course of several days stands as one of our biggest open questions.

“These are matters that should in fact have been discussed in the Situation Room before a Presidential decision was even made. Yet, per The Atlantic report, apparently no one on the chain ever raised these points,” former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton said on X.

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3. What are the security implications?

Sensitive national security information is generally discussed via secured channels or in the White House Situation Room—not on an open-source, commercial messaging app such as Signal, which is susceptible to being hacked by foreign adversaries despite being encrypted. The U.S. Defense Department recently sent out a departmentwide advisory warning of the app’s “vulnerability”—just days after the inadvertent leak to Goldberg.

Waltz apparently set up the Signal group as a way of bringing together what is known as the principals committee, a jargony term for a group of high-ranking officials. National security experts say using Signal for such discussions completely broke with standard protocol designed to avoid seeing intel fall into the wrong hands.

“The principals committee is really the apex of the national security decision-making process within the U.S. government,” former State Department spokesperson Ned Price told Foreign Policy. “Almost by definition, principals committees take place in the White House Situation Room.” Officials who can’t join in person due to travel can connect via what’s known as SVTC, or secure video teleconference, Price said, which can beam them into the Situation Room.

“If you’re the secretary of state or the secretary of defense, oftentimes you are called upon to be traveling around the world, and that’s totally acceptable and expected. But these principals have teams that will travel ahead of them, set up what are usually tents in their hotel room—or sometimes they go to the embassy—to make sure that they always have access to the top-secret system,” Price said. In extraordinary circumstances, principals can use top-secret phone lines and have their audio beamed into the Situation Room, Price added.

Price, who also previously worked as an intelligence analyst at the CIA and more recently as deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has sat on the principals committee and is baffled that Trump officials apparently held high-level conversations on national security via Signal.

“The idea that this type of discussion would be held on a commercial application that is susceptible to hacking and penetration by state and non-state actors is totally mind-boggling,” Price said. “There is no such thing as secure communication except for one venue, and that is classified U.S. government systems.”

Along these lines, Republican Rep. Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, also ripped into the Trump administration over the emerging scandal in comments to CNN on Monday. Bacon said he is a “signals intelligence officer by trade” and can “guarantee” that Russia and China are monitoring the phones used by the U.S. officials in the group chat.

“Everyone should know better than putting top secret war plans on an unclassified phone. Period. There is no excuse,” Bacon said.

Similarly, Bolton told CNN that he was “shocked” by the revelation that top national security officials were using Signal to discuss a military operation.

“I couldn’t imagine anybody would use Signal,” Bolton said. “You know, some of the guests have commented that Signal’s highly encrypted. I’ll just say this, if you think Signal is equivalent to U.S. government secure telecommunications, think again.”

Signalgate, as it’s now being called, could also make U.S. allies nervous about sharing intelligence with Washington moving forward.

“Intelligence cooperation and sharing relies on trust,” Price said, adding that “something like this really erodes the fabric of trust that friendly intelligence agencies have with us.” These agencies will “think twice” about sharing some of their “most sensitive secrets if they don’t feel like we can protect” them, Price said.

Indeed, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose country is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership that also includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, has already spoken out about the Trump administration’s Signal leak, calling it a “serious, serious issue.”

4. What are the possible legal consequences?

The Trump administration is scrambling to contain the fallout from this scandal. The White House has confirmed the existence of the group chat but says the information discussed was not classified and no “war plans” were shared.

Gabbard and Ratcliffe repeated that assertion under oath while testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.

But Democratic senators on the committee were not buying it. Sen. Mark Warner said to Gabbard: “If it’s not classified, share the texts now.” The Trump administration has not made the texts public, and we only have a partial picture of what was discussed via Goldberg’s report.

Goldberg reported that the plans discussed in the chat “included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing,” and national security experts are highly skeptical of the notion that the information was not classified.

“I don’t think there is any question that we are dealing with classified information. These are war plans,” Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and defense secretary, told MSNBC regarding Signalgate on Tuesday. Panetta said what was described in the report all qualifies as “highly classified information.”

Goldberg in his report wrote that “Hegseth, Ratcliffe, and other Cabinet-level officials presumably would have the authority to declassify information, and several of the national-security lawyers noted that the hypothetical officials on the Signal chain might claim that they had declassified the information they shared.”

But he went on to note that Signal is not approved by the U.S. government for sharing classified intelligence. As such, legal experts have raised the possibility that officials in the chat violated the Espionage Act, among other laws.

“While we won’t know anything for certain until we see the entirety of the text chain, it strains credulity to believe that the information provided by Hegseth in particular was not classified. Military plans, armaments, and operations, particularly pre-decisional details, clearly fall within the scope of classified information,” Bradley Moss, a Washington-based national security lawyer, told Foreign Policy.

Moss said the White House’s response so far is “more political spin than anything of legal substance.”

“Using Signal for official communications can be permissible, but it cannot include classified information and would still have to be archived for purposes of the Federal Records Act. The Espionage Act as well as provisions [on the unauthorized removal of classified documents] are certainly the type of criminal provisions that could be implicated by classified information spillage into Signal,” Moss said.

But it’s an open question whether federal law enforcement will investigate the matter, particularly given the steps that Trump has taken to ensure extreme loyalty across the government.

“I doubt anyone will be held to account for events described by The Atlantic unless Donald Trump himself feels the heat,” Bolton said on X, adding, “I have no faith that the Department of Justice will prosecute anyone involved.”

If Trump does begin to feel pushed in a corner, another question is who will take the fall for the scandal. Will it be Hegseth, as the classification authority regarding military plans? Or perhaps Waltz, who started the chat in the first place? Time will tell.

5. What does this tell us about the Trump team’s broader handling of national security?

Signalgate raises many questions regarding the Trump administration’s general practices when it comes to sensitive information and national security. Was this Signal group chat the only example of Trump officials discussing intelligence on unsecured channels?

“My real fear is that this was the tip of the iceberg,” Price said. “If the national security advisor was creating a Signal chat for this, what other Signal chats did he create? Was there a Russia principals committee small group? Was there a China small group, was there an Iran small group, a nuclear weapons small group? Where did this start, and where did it end?”

Trump already has a well-documented history of not showing caution when it comes to safeguarding intelligence. He once tweeted a classified satellite photo of Iran, for example, and famously shared classified information with Russian officials in the Oval Office in 2017. Though the president has the authority to declassify intelligence information as he sees fit, there is a process in place for doing so; it is not usually done on a whim. Trump was also indicted in 2023 in relation to his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office, though the case was dropped after he was reelected.

At Tuesday’s committee hearing, Warner said Signalgate was “one more example of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly toward classified information” from Trump and those around him.

“The Signal fiasco is not a one-off,” Warner added.