(NewsNation) — The Senate Intelligence Committee is holding an open hearing Tuesday on “worldwide threats.”
Witnesses include National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Kash Patel.
The top intelligence leaders’ testimony comes just hours after the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped a bombshell account of being added to a group chat for Trump administration officials.
Speaker Johnson: Waltz, Hegseth shouldn’t be disciplined over war plans Signal chat
In the chat, Goldberg said officials discussed plans for an attack against Houthi rebels in Yemen. Gabbard and Ratcliffe were reportedly included in the message thread.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have both since claimed that no “war plans” were being discussed.
Signal chat leak shows ‘sloppy, careless’ intelligence approach: Warner
Committee chairman Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., addressed the leak during his opening statement, calling the situation an example of the administration’s “sloppy, careless and incompetent” behavior surrounding classified information.
“Were these government devices? Were they personal devices? Had devices been collected to make sure there’s no malware? There’s plenty of declassified information that shows that our adversaries, China and Russia, are trying to break in to encrypted systems like Signal,” Warner said.
The Trump-Johnson alliance is working. For now
He added that, if an intelligence or military officer partook in something like that group chat, “they would be fired.”
