AILSA CHANG, HOST:
America's top intelligence officials were on Capitol Hill today for a preplanned hearing on global threats. The hearing comes after news broke yesterday that senior U.S. security officials discussed secret war plans for a military strike in a group chat on a publicly available messaging app and, in a major security breach, a journalist was included in that chat. NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas is covering all of this and joins us now. Hey, Ryan.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Hi there.
CHANG: OK, before we get into today's hearing, just remind us who exactly was in that group chat, and what were they talking about?
LUCAS: Right, so this all stems from the story that broke yesterday. The editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, said that he was invited by Trump National Security Adviser Mike Waltz into a group chat on the messaging app Signal. The chat was about Yemen. The other members in this group chat were really a who's who of senior national security officials. We're talking the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the vice president, among others. And they reportedly discussed the strategy, the targets, weapons and timing of air strikes that the U.S. ultimately carried out this month against the Houthis in Yemen. Now, two other officials who were in that chat are the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the CIA director, John Ratcliffe. And they both just happened to have a hearing scheduled for today before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
CHANG: Right, which is where this whole group chat fiasco was a major topic of discussion. So what did lawmakers have to say about it?
LUCAS: Well, Republican senators actually didn't ask about it at all in the public hearing, but Democrats absolutely grilled Gabbard and Ratcliffe on this. Democratic lawmakers called the actions of Trump's national security team here dangerous, incompetent, reckless, and they said that it could have had serious real world consequences. Here's the top Democrat on the panel, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia.
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MARK WARNER: This was not only sloppy, not only violated all procedures, but if this information had gotten out, American lives could have been lost.
LUCAS: Now, Warner said that's because the Houthis could have moved their air defenses or repositioned them if they'd had this info and then threatened American aircraft.
CHANG: Absolutely. OK, well, what did Gabbard and Ratcliffe have to say for themselves?
LUCAS: Well, Gabbard, at first, wouldn't even acknowledge that she was in the group chat. Ratcliffe, for his part, did acknowledge that right away. He said that he was in the chat, but he tried to downplay the gravity of the situation. He said that government officials are allowed to use Signal to communicate and coordinate for work. At the same time, I will say that our colleague, Tom Bowman, is reporting that the Pentagon warned a week ago against using Signal, even for unclassified information. Now, Ratcliffe and Gabbard both repeatedly said at the hearing today that none of the information was classified in this group chat, but lawmakers were very, very skeptical of that. Here's Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine.
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ANGUS KING: And if that's the case, please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion. It's hard for me to believe that targets and timing and weapons would not have been classified.
LUCAS: Now, questions about that specific information there Ratcliffe directed actually to the secretary of defense, who was not at the hearing, but Ratcliffe did, at one point, acknowledge that those sorts of things should only be discussed on classified channels. And, look, the government does have its own secure communication systems for these sorts of things. Now, the FBI director, Kash Patel, was at this hearing as well. Democrats asked him whether the FBI is investigating this breach, and Patel said that he didn't have any update on that.
CHANG: OK. So what happens next at this point? Anything?
LUCAS: Well, the administration is very much trying to say that this is all much ado about nothing. But I will say, the information discussed in the chat is exactly the sort of intelligence a sophisticated adversary like Russia or China would want on the U.S., and the officials in the chat are all top of the target list of foreign intelligence services. Now, as for what's next, Democrats on the Intelligence Committee made this clear today that they want to get to the bottom of it, and they have very much vowed to get to the end of this.
CHANG: That is NPR's Ryan Lucas. Thank you, Ryan.
LUCAS: Thank you.
CHANG: And we'll note that NPR's CEO, Katherine Maher, is chair of the board of Signal Foundation, which runs the Signal messaging app. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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