Tulsi Gabbard Fumbles Key Question on War Plans Group Chat Debacle

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard refused Tuesday to admit to her involvement in a major national security scandal. 

Trump administration officials used a Signal chat to discuss sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen earlier this month—and accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to join. 

Gabbard, who recently railed against leaks from the intelligence community, was reportedly one of the many high-ranking Cabinet officials in the group chat who lacked the basic due diligence to check the members of the group before spouting off about war plans.

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday about global threats to the United States, Gabbard flatly refused to answer questions about her own role in threatening national security. 

“Director Gabbard, did you participate in the group chat with the secretary of defense and other Trump senior officials discussing the Yemen war plans?” Senator Mark Warner asked. 

Gabbard refused to answer. “Uh, Senator I don’t want to get into the specifics—” she replied, before being cut off by Warner. 

The Virginia Democrat continued to press Gabbard to answer. “You were not ‘TG’ on this group chat?” he asked, referring to the Signal screen name. Gabbard continued to insist she would not “get into specifics.”

“Why aren’t you gonna get into the specifics? Is this—is it because it’s all classified?” Warner asked.

“Because this is currently under review by the National Security Council,” Gabbard said. 

“Because it’s all classified? If it’s not classified, share the texts now,” Warner said. 

Warner then turned to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who readily admitted to participating in the Signal group chat, claiming that its use was permitted under a Biden-era policy and insisted the platform was considered safe for use at the CIA, as long as the decisions made within the chat were recorded formally.  

Warner moved his attention back to Gabbard, asking whether she had requested a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, to discuss the strike plans. 

“There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal chat,” Gabbard said, suddenly more forthcoming. 

Her statement echoed that of White House, which claimed that not only were no classified materials shared but that no war plans were discussed. Much of the White House’s statement was false, and it also contradicted the National Security Council’s own prior statement confirming the legitimacy of the chat. 

“So, if there was no classified material, share it with the committee! You can’t have it both ways! These are important jobs! This is our national security,” Warner said. 

“Bobbing and weaving and trying to, you know, filibuster your answer—so please answer the question,” Warner said. “If this was a rank-and-file intelligence officer who did this kind of careless behavior, what would you do with them?”

“Senator, I’ll reiterate there was no classified material in that Signal—” Gabbard said, before being cut off. 

“And if there’s no classified materials, share! And then if there’s no classified materials, then answer—you can’t even answer the question whether you were on the chat,” Warner said, visibly frustrated.

He asked Gabbard what she planned to do if the information was, in fact, classified. She emphasized that there was a difference between the “inadvertent release” and “malicious leaks” of classified information, before restating that there was no classified material in the chat.

Will anyone in the Trump administration take their monumental national security leak seriously?

Administration officials were caught red-handed after The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed Monday they accidentally added him to a Signal chat earlier this month discussing sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen.

When asked directly about the scandal on Monday, Donald Trump appeared bewildered and unaware, telling reporters at the White House that he knew “nothing about it.” But by Tuesday, Trump had a notably different response, openly joking about the misconduct.

In response to a post in which his billionaire adviser, Elon Musk, mocked The Atlantic by claiming that the second page of the publication is the “best place to hide a dead body,” on the basis that “no one ever goes there,” Trump shared an article by the satirical conservative rag The Babylon Bee.

“4D Chess: Genius Trump Leaks War Plans To ‘The Atlantic’ Where No One Will Ever See Them,” the headline reads.

The monumental slipup was a horrific omen for U.S. national security, whose weakest link is apparently a crew of Cabinet members who can’t accomplish the basic due diligence of double-checking who they’re adding to a group chat hosted by a private company.

Trump and Musk are just two of several heads of state that have attempted to undercut Goldberg’s report. So far, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have also opted to deny, deny, deny the egregious error.

Regardless of whether the administration wants to confront what other former U.S. officials are lambasting as “the highest level of fuckup imaginable,” the existence of the group chat has already been verified. A spokesperson for the National Security Council, Brian Hughes, already confirmed to Goldberg that the chat was real.

The Social Security Administration has been crippled by cuts to the agency pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The Washington Post reports that employee cuts at the SSA have led to office managers at field offices being forced to answer phone calls at the front desk in place of fired receptionists. In addition, the agency’s website crashed four times in 10 days in March due to server overloads, preventing millions of retired people and the disabled from accessing their online accounts.

On top of that, the office that monitors whether people are satisfied with their service was also cut by DOGE, making it nearly impossible to figure out small ways to fix some, if any of the problems.

Unable to get answers from the SSA, Americans who depend on Social Security have flooded congressional offices with angry phone calls. The AARP says it has been getting 2,000 calls a week since early February, double its usual amount, from people concerned about their Social Security benefits.

The SSA is responsible for $1.5 trillion in benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans, and now is struggling to deliver to these vulnerable groups. About 40 percent of older Americans depend on Social Security as their primary source of income.

At present, the agency is being run by acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, who has cut more than 12 percent of the SSA’s 57,000-person staff and says DOGE is calling the shots, despite a court order last week preventing Musk’s cronies from accessing the agency.

Dudek’s predecessor, Michelle King, quit her job as acting commissioner rather than hand over Americans’ sensitive personal information to DOGE. Still, Musk’s staffers have pressed on with their quest to find fraud in Social Security benefits, a problem that isn’t as extensive as they claim. Instead, their efforts have resulted in the people who depend on those benefits being shut out altogether.

Dudek and DOGE’s actions have caused chaos within the agency, pushing out experienced officials who were running the SSA’s complicated information technology and benefit systems. As a result, an agency that has been underfunded for years now is on the brink of being shut down, according to Dudek, who wasn’t happy with last week’s court order blocking DOGE from accessing Americans’ data.

Is all of this by design? Musk has called Social Security “the greatest Ponzi scheme of all time,” and conservatives have long sought to privatize the agency. One former agency veteran who took early retirement this month told the Post, “They’re creating a fire to require them to come and put it out.” If that is the goal, is there anything that can save one of America’s most successful anti-poverty programs?

Despite the evidence, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is still opting to attack and discredit the journalist who caught him red-handed in a seismic national security scandal.

“Can you share how your information about war plans against the Houthis in Yemen was shared with a journalist at The Atlantic? And were those details classified?” a reporter asked Hegseth as he disembarked from Air Force One in Hawaii Monday.

“So you are talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again,” Hegseth said, referring to coverage of the Mueller investigation as a conspiracy, or when Donald Trump said, in the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally, that there were “some very fine people” on both sides.

“This is the guy that peddles in garbage,” Hegseth said, continuing to evade the questions.

Trump administration officials accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal chat regarding sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen earlier this month. The monumental slipup was a horrific omen for U.S. national security, whose weakest link is apparently a crew of Cabinet members who can’t accomplish the basic due diligence of double-checking who they’re adding to a group chat hosted by a private company.

Hours later, Goldberg told MSNBC that Hegseth’s response was “flummoxing” to him.

“I haven’t seen this kind of unserious behavior before,” he told the network. “The secretary of defense, with all due respect, seems like a person who is unserious and is trying to deflect from the fact that he participated in a conversation on an unclassified messaging app that he probably shouldn’t have participated in.”

Like Hegseth, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt similarly opted to run the administration’s favorite defense strategy of deny, deny, deny.

In a statement Tuesday morning, Leavitt claimed that “no ‘war plans’ were discussed in the group chat and that ‘no classified material was sent to the thread,’” while disparaging Goldberg as a journalist “well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

But that old Trumpian tactic won’t work here—particularly since a spokesperson for the National Security Council, Brian Hughes, already confirmed to Goldberg that the chat was, indeed, real.

For all of the Trump administration’s “unseriousness” about the leak, though, some former government officials were taking it perfectly seriously.

“From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of fuckup imaginable,” posted former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “These people cannot keep America safe.”

The White House has decided to lie its way out.

Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt took to X on Tuesday to set the record straight on senior defense adviser Mike Waltz’s massive gaffe: adding Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, to a Signal group chat with himself, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and other high-ranking officials discussing the bombing of Yemen.

“Jeffrey Goldberg is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” Leavitt wrote, before going on to deny the story entirely

Much of Leavitt’s post is just false, and contradicts the National Security Council’s own prior statement. “At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes said Monday. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to our servicemembers or our national security.”

Screenshots collected by Goldberg also clearly show the country’s top defense officials debating over how to carry out an attack on the Houthis—an attack that occurred days after the messages were sent.

​​”Team—establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours,” a message from Waltz reads, according to Goldberg. “My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

“Whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes,” Waltz said in another message.

Concerned citizens everywhere are calling BS.

“With all due respect to Karoline here (none), this is an obvious lie,” wrote Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor. “They were discussing the names of specific individuals the US military was targeting with air strikes. That is absolutely, 100% guaranteed to have been classified information.”

“Thanks for confirming the Signal chat existed and that Cabinet members are so inept that they added Jeffrey Goldberg,” another reply to Leavitt’s statement read.

This comes after Defense Secretary Hegseth outright denied that any war plans were shared and Trump denied that he knew anything about the situation at all—ignorance that did unfortunately feel sincere.