News that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally invited The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Cabinet-level group chat discussion where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth uploaded plans for U.S. military strikes in Yemen ought to prompt the resignations of both officials.
It’s irrelevant that Signal, the messaging app used by the group chat, is a secure platform; the personal phones on which Trump administration officials likely ran the app most certainly are not. If a foreign intelligence service can access one of these officials’ personal phones, it can access their Signal chats. At least one member of the group, Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff, was in Moscow at the time the discussion took place, while another, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, admitted under questioning that she was overseas as well.
As a breach of security, the Signal group chat is unprecedented in its negligence. What’s more, the group chat also likely violates a number of laws relating to the disclosure of sensitive national defense information and federal records retention — Waltz had apparently set the group’s messages to disappear after one to four weeks.
This incident only reinforces the impression that President Trump has assembled a squad of inept amateurs for his national security team. Though Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, DNI Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were all included in the chat, for instance, none thought to even ask why they were discussing the details of an upcoming military operation in an app on their unsecured personal phones. That suggests that such informal deliberations are a standard operating procedure for Trump’s national security team. Indeed, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested as much in a recent hearing.
Congress should mount a serious and thorough investigation into the Trump administration’s wider use of personal phones and messaging apps, encrypted or otherwise, to plan military operations and discuss sensitive national security matters. At minimum, however, National Security Adviser Waltz and Secretary Hegseth should immediately resign for their roles in this debacle.
For his part, Waltz carelessly added a journalist to a group chat that he organized via Signal, a secure app installed on insecure personal phones. Whatever the reasoning behind this move, it likely contravenes the spirit and letter of laws meant to safeguard sensitive national defense information and preserve communications involving senior federal officials. Waltz cannot remain as national security adviser, given his apparent disregard for laws and rules regarding sensitive information and records retention.
Hegseth, already unqualified and unfit for his position as secretary of defense, should resign for his cavalier disclosure of plans for impending military operations in the group chat, presumably via an insecure personal phone. According to Goldberg, Hegseth revealed details including “the specific time of a future attack, specific targets, including human targets, meant to be killed in that attack, weapons systems, even weather reports… It was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.” The fact that the Pentagon itself had warned against using Signal in a building-wide email just after the group chat took place puts Hegseth’s eagerness to share these details in an even less favorable light.
Neither Waltz’s nor Hegseth’s resignations will repair the damage done by their careless and reckless handling of sensitive national security information. Nor will it address the Trump administration’s wider use of messaging apps to discuss defense and foreign policy issues. But they are an important first step toward accountability.
