Gabbard, Ratcliffe face lawmakers over leaked Signal chat details
REUTERS/LEAH MILLIS
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and U.S. Air Force Lt. General and Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Jeffrey Kruse attend a House Intelligence Committee hearing about worldwide threats, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., today.
Top intelligence officials who were part of a group chat on a consumer messaging app that discussed U.S. military plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen were testifying before the House Intelligence Committee today, hours after The Atlantic published more messages from the group, which had inadvertently included the publication’s top editor.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, were facing questions over the chat, whose disclosure was a stunning breach of operational secrecy that Trump administration officials have attempted to downplay.
The newly published messages, which include screenshots of the full chat on the messaging app Signal, make clear that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth included specific details of the timing of the launches from aircraft carriers of the U.S. military jets that were to strike Houthi targets.
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Launch times are typically closely guarded to ensure that the targets cannot move into hiding or mount a counterattack at the very moment planes are taking off, when they are potentially vulnerable.
Testifying before the House panel, Gabbard reiterated her assertion that no classified information was shared on the chat. She was pressed by Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the committee, about her testimony to a Senate panel Tuesday that precise details of the attack were not included in the messages. She replied: “My answer yesterday was based on my recollection, or the lack thereof, on the details that were posted there.”
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Ratcliffe said the newly released information shows that he did not put classified information into the chat. “I used an appropriate channel to communicate sensitive information,” he said. “It was permissible to do so. I didn’t transfer any classified information.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, had been inadvertently added to the chat and was able to observe the messages, which he said he initially thought was a masquerade. He left the group after he realized that it “was almost certainly real” after the strikes forecast in the chat took place. The Atlantic said its release Wednesday included all the texts except the name of a CIA officer working as an aide to Ratcliffe at the request of the CIA.
Hegseth did not post all the details of the war plans and did not identify the precise targets the planes were going to hit, other than to say they were going after a “Target Terrorist.” But Hegseth posted the precise times that various waves of planes would take off, information that is typically highly classified.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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