Thursday Briefing

Newly released Signal texts showed what was at stake

More messages were published yesterday from a Signal group chat between President Trump’s top security officials that laid out plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen and that inadvertently included the editor in chief of The Atlantic. Read the annotated chat.

Speaking to reporters yesterday, Trump dismissed concerns about the leak as a “witch hunt,” and he suggested that the messaging app was at fault for the journalist’s inclusion.

Democrats have called for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to step down, saying he had behaved recklessly by revealing the precise timing of the strikes on Houthi targets and could have endangered American troops. He has not apologized, insisting instead that the information shared in the chat was not “war plans.”

Technically, the exchanges did not include war plans, according to David Sanger, our White House correspondent who covers national security. But Hegseth’s descriptions were so detailed that the distinction may not have mattered, he added.

“Had the chat leaked,” David said, “it could have given advance warning to the Houthis, who could have simply left the site and defeated the mission. They could have also prepared to launch against the planes, which would have put the pilots’ lives at risk.” (Read more about what makes information classified, and what a “war plan” really means.)

Listen: The Atlantic journalist told The Daily what it was like to accidentally be included in the infamous group chat.