Trump said he would "look into" the use of the Signal app as he put on a united front at a meeting with US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who inadvertently included The Atlantic magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg in the conversation of top national security officials.
As Democrats scented blood for perhaps the first time since the Republican returned to power in January, Trump doubled down by attacking Goldberg as a "sleazebag" and said "nobody gives a damn" about the story rocking Washington.
Journalist Goldberg said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent information in the Signal chat about targets, weapons and timing ahead of the strikes on March 15. Goldberg also revealed highly critical comments by top US officials about European allies.
"There was no classified information," Trump told reporters when asked about the chat, saying that the commercial app Signal was used by "a lot of people in government."
Waltz said US technical and legal experts were looking into the breach but insisted he had "never met, don't know, never communicated" with the journalist.
He later told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that he took "full responsibility" for the breach, saying: "I built the group; my job is to make sure everything's coordinated."
Waltz suggested the leak was the result of him mistakenly saving Goldberg's number under another name.
"Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else's number?" he said.
Trump meanwhile said in an interview with Newsmax later on Tuesday that someone who "worked for Mike Waltz at a lower level" may have had Goldberg's number and somehow been responsible for him ending up in the chat.
- 'Sloppy, careless, incompetent' -
The comments came as part of an aggressive Trump administration pushback against the scandal.
US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe -- who were both reported to be in the chat -- endured a stormy Senate Intelligence Committee hearing over the leak.
"There was no classified material that was shared," Gabbard, who has previously caused controversy with comments sympathetic to Russia and Syria, told the panel.
Ratcliffe confirmed he was involved in the Signal group but said the communications were "entirely permissible and lawful."
Hegseth, a former Fox News host with no experience running a huge organization like the Pentagon, had said Monday that "nobody was texting war plans."
But Democrats on the committee called on Waltz and Hegseth to resign.
Senator Mark Warner blasted what he called "sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior."
Other White House officials also went on the attack against the Democratic narrative.
"Don't let enemies of America get away with these lies," White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said on X, describing the row as a "witch hunt."
Trump has repeatedly used the same term to dismiss an investigation into whether his 2016 election campaign colluded with Moscow.
- 'Freeloading' -
The Atlantic's bombshell report has sparked concerns over the use of a commercial app instead of secure government communications -- and about whether US adversaries may have been able to hack in.
Trump's special Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin when he was included in the group, CBS News reported.
The report also revealed potentially embarrassing details of what top White House officials think about key allies.
Trump said he agreed with Pentagon chief Hegseth's reported comments in the chat that European nations were "freeloading" off the United States.
"Yeah I think they've been freeloading," Trump told reporters. "The European Union's been absolutely terrible to us on trade."
In the chat, a user identified as JD Vance, the US vice president, opposed the strikes saying that "I just hate bailing Europe out again" as countries there were more affected by Huthi attacks on shipping than the United States.
A user identified as Hegseth replies: "I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It's PATHETIC."
The Huthi rebels, who have controlled much of Yemen for more than a decade, are part of the "axis of resistance" of pro-Iran groups staunchly opposed to Israel and the US.
They have launched scores of drone and missile attacks at ships passing Yemen in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden during the Gaza war, saying they were carried out in solidarity with Palestinians.
What is Signal and is it secure?
Washington (AFP) Mar 25, 2025 -
Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messaging app that is considered one of the most secure in the world by security professionals, but was never intended to be the go-to choice for White House officials planning a military operation.
What differentiates it from other messaging apps, and why has its use by top Trump officials planning strikes on Yemen raised concerns?
- What is end-to-end encryption? -
End-to-end encryption means that any sent message travels in a scrambled form and can only be deciphered by the end user.
Nobody in between -- not the company providing the service, not your internet provider, nor hackers intercepting the message -- can read the content because they don't have the keys to unlock it.
Signal is not the only messaging service to do this, but unlike WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage, the app is controlled by an independent non-profit -- not a big tech behemoth motivated by revenue -- winning it more trust with those concerned about privacy.
Signal crucially goes further than WhatsApp on data privacy by making metadata such as when the message was delivered and who it was sent to invisible even to the company itself.
WhatsApp, meanwhile, shares information with its parent company Meta and third parties, including your phone number, mobile device information, and IP addresses.
For these reasons, Signal has always been a go-to messaging service for users especially concerned about communications secrecy, notably people working in security professions, journalists, and their sources.
- Who owns Signal? -
Founded in 2012, Signal is owned by the Mountain View, California-based Signal Foundation.
Its history is linked to WhatsApp: the site was founded by cryptographer and entrepreneur Moxie Marlinspike, with an initial $50 million from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton.
Both Signal and WhatsApp, which was bought by Mark Zuckerberg in 2014, are based on the same protocol built by Marlinspike.
"We're not tied to any major tech companies, and we can never be acquired by one either," Signal's website reads. Development is mainly supported by grants and donations.
Very outspoken compared to other Silicon Valley bosses, Signal's CEO is Meredith Whittaker, who spent years working for Google, is a fierce critic of business models built on the extraction of personal data.
- How secure is Signal? -
"Signal is a very solid platform because of the way that it goes about doing its business, the way that it frequently updates the app, the way that it uses end-to-end encryption," said Michael Daniel, former White House cybersecurity coordinator under Barack Obama and current head of the Cyber Threat Alliance.
But "it was never built or intended to be used for discussing military plans," Daniel told AFP.
The real vulnerability, Daniel said, is not so much the app itself, "but everything that goes on around it. It's more that these (messages) are on personal devices that may or may not be stored in a secure manner or protected in the right way."
He noted that given their responsibilities, the high-level officials involved in the Yemen conversation would have communications teams capable of handling the conversation using the appropriate methods.
Coincidentally, the Pentagon warned staff in a memo last week against using Signal, according to NPR, citing threats from Russian hackers.
The Pentagon said that Russia was taking advantage of the app's linked devices feature -- which allows users to sign into their account from PCs and laptops -- to spy on conversations.
Daniel said that under normal circumstances, "it wouldn't have been that difficult to jump off their phones and do this in the proper protocols," he said, adding that having an outsider involved would have been impossible if the right technology was used.
Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University and has collaborated with the development of Signal, said on Bluesky that by asking it to step up to "military grade" communications, Signal was "being asked to do a lot!"
He warned that Signal, which shot up on the list of most downloaded apps after the revelation, could become a victim of its own success.
"As the only encrypted messenger people seem to 'really' trust, Signal is going to end up being a target for too many people," he said.
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