There’s so much attention to this that you likely already know all you want to. So I’ll just do a quick summary of some key points in The New York Times’ article:
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed war plans in an encrypted group chat that included a journalist two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen, the White House said on Monday, confirming an account in the magazine The Atlantic.
“The editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote in an article published on Monday that he was mistakenly added to the text chat on the commercial messaging app Signal by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser.
“It was an extraordinary breach of American national security intelligence. Not only was the journalist inadvertently included in the group, but the conversation also took place outside the secure government channels that would normally be used for classified and highly sensitive war planning.
"Several Defense Department officials expressed shock that Mr. Hegseth had put American war plans into a commercial chat group. They said that having this type of conversation in a Signal chat group itself could be a violation of the Espionage Act, a law covering the handling of sensitive information.
“Revealing operational war plans before planned strikes could also put American troops directly into harm’s way, the officials said. And former F.B.I. officials who worked on leak cases described this as a devastating breach of national security.
“Former national security officials said that if personal cellphones were used in the group chat, the behavior would be even more egregious because of ongoing Chinese hacking efforts.”
Here is a conversation in The Atlantic between Goldberg and staff writer David Graham on what the incident reveals about the Trump administration.
Here is a comprehensive, well documented writeup of what happened and reaction to it by historian Heather Cox Richardson.
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