March 25, 2025 11:36 AM UTC

Amateur Hour: Dems Outraged Over Massive Top-Level Security Breach

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Heather Willard reports for FOX 31 on the explosive controversy over a chat between top Trump administration officials discussing then-upcoming military action against Yemen using the unauthorized Signal app, a major breach of operational security and records retention laws made immeasurably worse by the accidental inclusion in the chat of…the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg:

On Monday, an article was published that caused concern for many legislators over how the Trump Administration is handling classified material, and several Colorado legislators said the matter is putting Americans at risk.

It’s all because of an article from The Atlantic which describes how the publication’s editor-in-chief was included in a text thread of top U.S. officials planning to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen. The chat was made in a messaging app called Signal, which is encrypted, instead of using government-secured communications channels.

Colorado’s Rep. Jason Crow, who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Armed Services Committee had choice words to describe the situation:

Sen. Michael Bennet reminded newly-minted Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard of her own past statements about releasing classified information:

Bennet added this morning:

Finalizing sensitive war plans in an unclassified group chat is not just an embarrassment; it’s an egregious threat to U.S. national security. We cannot accept this reckless behavior from our country’s highest leaders. Democrats will be demanding answers at today’s Worldwide Threats Intelligence committee hearing.

The Washington Post reports that Democrats made good on promises to demand answers in a Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing today:

Democrats hammered the United States’ top intelligence officials Tuesday morning as they delivered the annual global threat assessment to Congress — a day after a bombshell report that the vice president, secretary of defense, national security adviser and other top Cabinet members used a commercial messaging app to discuss secret war plans for Yemen and inadvertently included a journalist in the group chat…

“If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer, and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (Virginia), the committee’s top Democrat, said in his opening remarks, noting that in addition to the targeting information, the text chain included the identity of an active CIA officer. “This is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly toward classified information,” exhibited by the Trump administration, Warner said, adding: “This is not a one-off.”

Following today’s hearing featuring evasive answers from Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Democrats are calling for the resignations of National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It was reportedly Waltz who accidentally added The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal chat, compounding the mistake of using Signal for this high-level meeting with the bumbling incompetence of adding someone who could have been anyone to the message chain and jeopardizing the secrecy of everything they discussed. Perhaps the only saving grace, if you can even call it that, is that Waltz’s incompetence exposed what they were doing, which hopefully will lead to tighter policies.

In the meantime, in a perfect world, or at least a world where these officials were Democrats, everybody who participated in this massive breach of security would lose their security clearances–and yes, that means they wouldn’t be able to do their top-level jobs anymore. But in the Trump administration, the abiding axiom is that loyalty matters more than competence. That’s how Waltz, Hegseth, and most of Trump’s Cabinet got their jobs to begin with.

Unfortunately, this “amateur hour” is going to persist much longer.