Tuesday Briefing

U.S. officials’ group chat about war plans included a journalist

The U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, disclosed plans for striking targets in Yemen in a group chat on the Signal app that included the editor in chief of The Atlantic, two hours before the attacks on the Houthi militia were carried out, the White House said yesterday, confirming an account in the magazine.

In an extraordinary security breach, Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist, was mistakenly added to the chat by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser. The conversation took place outside the secure government channels that would normally be used for classified and highly sensitive war planning.

Defense Department officials expressed shock that Hegseth had put American war plans into a commercial chat group. That itself could be a violation of the Espionage Act, a law covering the handling of sensitive information, they said.

Details: At 11:44 a.m. on March 15, Hegseth posted the “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Goldberg wrote. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the U.S., could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.”

Quotable: Vice President JD Vance, who was in the group chat, expressed reluctance about the strikes, arguing that European countries benefited from U.S. efforts to protect shipping lanes from Houthi attacks. “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” he said. Hegseth responded: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”