The leaders of the U.S. intelligence community testified at a Senate hearing on Tuesday that their discussions about airstrikes in Yemen on a private messaging application were “permitted” and that the messages mistakenly shared with a journalist did not include classified material.
Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, offered more details under questioning from senators on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the Atlantic’s bombshell report on Monday that the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a cabinet-level chat on Signal about airstrikes on Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
“One of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers,” Ratcliffe said in response to questions from the committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.).
“One of the things that I was briefed on very early, senator, was by the CIA records management folks about the use of Signal as a permissible work use—it is,” he said. “That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.”
“It is permissible to use to communicate and coordinate for work purposes, provided, senator, that any decisions that are made are also recorded through formal channels,” he added. “My communications, to be clear, in a Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
Gabbard went further, stating that “there was no classified material that was shared in that group chat.”
The Atlantic’s Goldberg reported on Monday that Mike Waltz, the U.S. national security advisor, added Goldberg to a message group called “Houthi PC small group” on March 11. The group name was an apparent reference to the principals committee of the National Security Council.
In the chat, participants, which included Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Waltz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, discussed the timing of planned airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen and made incendiary comments about Europe.
“I fully share your loathing of European free-loading,” Hegseth wrote in a message to the vice president. “It’s pathetic.”
The White House shared a statement with reporters on Monday that the text chain “appears to be authentic,” and Ratcliffe and Gabbard confirmed their participation in the group.
It is not clear how or why Waltz added Goldberg to the chat, though the journalist appeared on the app by his initials, which he shares with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, who sits on the principals committee when international economic issues are implicated in a national security agenda item.
Waltz told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg.
Questions about the Signal group dominated Tuesday’s hearing on the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment report, with Democrats seizing on the administration’s claims that no classified material was shared in the chat and several Republicans indicating that they intended to ask questions about the messages during the classified hearing session later in the day.
“The idea somehow, well, none of this was classified, but we can’t talk about it here—you can’t have it both ways,” Warner said. “I think it strains the audience and the watching public’s credibility if we’re talking about timing packages, that somehow this would be okay to put out, or just, frankly, senior American officials trashing Europe.”
“I’ve been around this for a while. This is not information you generally put out,” he added. “The notion there’s not even acknowledgement of, ‘hey, gosh, we screwed up,’ it’s stunning to me.”
After Gabbard testified that no classified material of any kind had been shared in the chat, the chairman of the committee, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked the witnesses about the narrower claim that they had not shared classified information from the intelligence community, as opposed to information that might have been shared by other members of the group with different classification authorities.
“They testified, it is my understanding, correct me if I’m wrong, that there was no intelligence community classified information. Is that correct?” Cotton asked.
Both Gabbard and Ratcliffe affirmed that that was correct.
That answer prompted an outburst from Sen. Angus King (D-Maine.). “That’s not correct,” he said. “She said repeatedly that there was nothing classified. Period.”
After the hearing, U.S. President Donald Trump denied that classified material was sent on the chat in a briefing with reporters at the White House.
“There was no classified information, as I understand it, they used an app,” Trump said. “The main thing was, nothing happened. The attack was totally successful.”
Tuesday’s Senate hearing also included testimony from Gabbard and Ratcliffe about their assessment of global threats to the United States, including Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
“The intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard said. “In the past year, we’ve seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus.”
She added that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium “is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
“Iran will likely continue efforts to counter Israel and press for U.S. military withdrawal from the region by aiding, arming and helping to reconstitute its loose consortium of like-minded terrorists and militant actors, which it refers to as its Axis of Resistance.” she said. “Although weakened, this collection of actors still presents a wide range of threats, including to Israel’s population, U.S. forces deployed in Iraq and Syria and to U.S. and international military and commercial shipping and transit.”
Two anti-Israel protesters from Code Pink interrupted the start of the hearing, including a man, who said that “the greatest threat to world peace is funding Israel.”
That outburst prompted Cotton to connect the various threats to the United States to Code Pink, which reportedly receives about a quarter of its funding from a China-based philanthropist with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“The fact that Communist China funds Code Pink, which interrupts a hearing like this about Israel, simply illustrates Director Gabbard’s points that China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and other American adversaries are working in concert to greater degree than they ever have before,” Cotton said.
One of the hearing’s final questions returned to the question of accidentally inviting a journalist to a group chat about bombing terrorists in Yemen.
“Director Ratcliffe, this was a huge mistake, correct?” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) asked.
“No,” Ratcliffe replied.