JD Vance, the memoir writer turned vice-president, thought the air strikes against the Houthis in Yemen were “a mistake”. Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned defence secretary, made the case for action. “I think we should go,” he said.
Both men expressed their disdain for America’s allies in Europe just as ardently in private as Donald Trump’s administration is projecting in public. “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vance said.
Such exchanges among top cabinet officials and national security officials normally unfold in the White House situation room or other highly secure communication lines.
But this one between more than a dozen top officials ahead of this month’s US military operation against the Iran-backed militia group occurred on a Signal chat that was shared with Jeffrey Goldberg, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine.
The account of the electronic deliberations published on Monday, which were confirmed as authentic by the White House, shook Trump’s Washington within minutes.
The Signal chat — called “Houthi PC Small Group” — represented one of the most glaring national security breaches in recent US history, though it is unclear whether it will ever be investigated by the federal law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, that Trump has tried to bring under his thumb.
The DoJ declined to comment on the breach. The FBI referred any questions to the Pentagon, which did not respond to a request for comment.
It also highlighted the extent to which Vance is positioning himself in internal foreign policy discussions as the staunchest isolationist, to the point of dissenting privately with Trump’s first big military strike.
And it definitively showed the depth of the misgivings about Europe in the minds of top Trump officials at a time when they are questioning the value of Nato and moving to launch a transatlantic trade war.
One of the officials’ main reservations about striking the Houthis was that it would allow European economies to freeride off America’s power to clear Red Sea shipping lanes. “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading, it’s pathetic,” Hegseth said in response to Vance.
Trump’s only comment on the exchange has been to say he did not know “anything” about the breach, and there was no indication that anyone would be held accountable.
But Democrats swiftly called for resignations, naming Hegseth, as well as Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who accidentally invited the journalist to the chat, or Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence who just this month had declared that the “unauthorised release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such”.
“Heads must roll. This is one of the dumbest security breaches in history, and it suggests a larger pattern of potentially criminal behavior that puts Americans at risk,” Don Beyer, a Democratic congressman from Virginia, wrote on X.
Some legal experts agreed that the discussion and disclosure of sensitive military plans were potentially illegal.
“If this is national defence information knowingly transmitted over a medium that is not secure, that could be a violation” of the Espionage Act of 1917, said Deborah Curtis, partner at Arnold & Porter.
“Signal is a private end-to-end encryption [messaging service],” she added. “It is not a US government-approved medium to have such a conversation . . . Especially given you don’t necessarily know who is at the [other] end of the app.”
Michael O’Hanlon, director of foreign policy research at the Brookings Institution think-tank said the episode revealed “a remarkable sloppiness” among senior officials that “should have known better”.
“You had most of the top national security team, if not virtually all of it, complicit in this chain of communication, and none of them had the wisdom to shut it down. At a minimum, they should all go to the woodshed. And if they don’t apologise for this, then it sort of speaks to a casualness and cavalierness that scares me.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill tried to downplay the incident, suggesting it was nothing more than a lesson to be learned for the future and that the debate itself was healthy.
“They’re going to track that down and make sure that doesn’t happen again,” Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, told reporters.
He added: “What you did see though, I think, was top-level officials doing their job, doing it well, and executing on a plan with precision.”
“Sounds like a huge screw-up,” John Cornyn, the Texas senator, told a different group of journalists, sounding a bit more perturbed. “It sounds like somebody dropped the ball.”
To Trump’s critics, the sloppiness in discussing classified information will come as no surprise given that the president was prosecuted for allegedly mishandling sensitive national security documents stored at Mar-a-Lago after his first term in a federal case that was dropped after his 2024 victory.
Even so, the Signal chat revelations on Monday has triggered a new round of outrage that Trump and his team will find hard to brush off.
“What this incident reflects is inconceivable recklessness and carelessness when it comes to national security information,” said Emily Berman, professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
“That doesn’t make it any more likely that the president’s national security team and the VP will be prosecuted en masse,” she added.
