New Messages From Government Signal Group Released; White House Responds

The Atlantic obtained the messages.

The White House in Washington on March 11, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

The Atlantic on March 26 published more messages from the Signal group chat that included top U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the group, which officials said is being investigated, as the chat involved discussion of an attack on Houthi terrorists in the Middle East. The outlet had declined to release all of the messages, saying some of them “if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel.”

After President Donald Trump and others, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, said that neither war plans nor classified information was shared in the group, the outlet on March 26 published the remainder of the alleged messages in a story titled “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal.”

The messages included Hegseth’s alleged statement of the exact time drone strikes would occur, as well as when F-18s would launch.

“The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions,” Goldberg and his coauthor said. “There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on social media platform X after the messages were released that “The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans.’”

“They backpedaled the whole ‘war plans’ thing really really fast,” the Department of Defense, which Hegseth heads, stated.

The original Atlantic article said the discussion involved “war plans.” The new article does not include that phrase.

Trump has said that the government would likely not use Signal, a messaging application, moving forward.

“We may be forced to use it. You may be in a situation where you need speed as opposed to gross safety, and you may be forced to use it, but generally speaking, I think we probably won’t be using it very much,” he told reporters at the White House on March 25.

The president also said he still backs national security adviser Michael Waltz, who has taken responsibility for the addition of Goldberg to the group and has faced calls to step down or be fired.

“We are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” Waltz told reporters.

He told Fox News later that it was his responsibility, not one of his staffers’.

Democrats have called for an investigation into how officials used Signal to talk about attack plans.

“For the defense secretary to coordinate war plans in such a haphazard and dangerous way puts our national security, our troops, and every single American at risk. They intentionally put highly classified information on an unclassified device,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on March 25 on the Senate floor in Washington.

He said that the Senate should probe the matter and that the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General should also investigate.

“This is too serious not to know exactly what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it from ever happening again,” he said.