Heads are still spinning in Washington in the wake of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s bombshell report in The Atlantic that he was accidentally included in a group chat on Signal with the senior-most national security officials in the Trump administration as they discussed impending US strikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Despite two members of the group chat, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, having been grilled on the matter by senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, numerous questions remain about how this shocking national security breach happened and what it all means for the people involved as well as for the country more broadly.
Here are five big questions we still have about this escalating scandal.
1. How did Goldberg get added to the group chat in the first place?
This remains perhaps the biggest mystery of all.
Goldberg wrote that US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz sent him the initial connection request on Signal—a feature that allows the platform’s users to control who is able to communicate with them—which Goldberg accepted, “hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.”
Goldberg said that two days later, he received a notice on Signal that he had been added to a group chat called the “Houthi PC small group.”
The White House has said it’s reviewing how Goldberg was inadvertently added to the chain, but so far, no officials have offered an explanation. When asked during Tuesday’s committee hearing about it, Ratcliffe said he did not know how Goldberg was invited to join the chat and that he had seen “conflicting reports” about who had invited the journalist, despite Goldberg having said unequivocally that it was Waltz.
Goldberg also reported that he eventually left the chat after determining that it was genuine. When someone leaves a group on Signal, the group’s creator is notified. But Goldberg said no one reached out to him after he departed the chat. It’s unclear if Waltz did not notice Goldberg leaving or simply chose not to react.
2. Why did none of the officials in the chat, which occurred over several days, raise concerns about Signal being an inappropriate way to communicate about sensitive national security information?
In addition to the US national security advisor, CIA director, and director of national intelligence, officials in the group reportedly included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, among several others.
Many of these people have significant experience dealing with classified national security information and should have known better than to discuss details about impending US military operations over Signal (and with a journalist on the group chat). Rubio was a US senator who was a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Gabbard is a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve and, as a member of Congress, served on the House Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs committees. Ratcliffe was director of national intelligence during President Donald Trump’s first term.
A number of the officials in the chat have also made public statements in the past on the importance of operational security and avoiding using unsecured channels that could compromise sensitive national security information—often in relation to former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as the top US diplomat.
Waltz touched on the Clinton email scandal in a 2023 post on Twitter (now X). “Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did the DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing,” Waltz said at the time while sharing a 2016 Politico report regarding Sullivan’s connection to the Clinton email scandal.
Hegseth has also repeatedly criticised Democrats, including Clinton, in relation to their handling of classified information. “If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now,” Hegseth said in 2016.
In other words, the officials involved appear to be fully aware of the laws surrounding sharing sensitive information and the potential for unsecured platforms to be compromised, but they still went forward with using Signal to discuss an upcoming US military operation. Why none of them raised concerns as the chat remained active over the course of several days stands as one of our biggest open questions.
“These are matters that should in fact have been discussed in the Situation Room before a Presidential decision was even made. Yet, per The Atlantic report, apparently no one on the chain ever raised these points,” former US National Security Advisor John Bolton said on X.
I was shocked to learn of the inexplicable use of a non-official, non-US government channel to discuss sensitive military plans, as reported by The Atlantic. These are matters that should in fact have been discussed in the Situation Room before a Presidential decision was even... pic.twitter.com/HRBT3za8QB
— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) March 24, 2025
3. What are the security implications?
Sensitive national security information is generally discussed via secured channels or in the White House Situation Room—not on an open-source, commercial messaging app such as Signal, which is susceptible to being hacked by foreign adversaries despite being encrypted. The US Defence Department recently sent out a departmentwide advisory warning of the app’s “vulnerability”—just days after the inadvertent leak to Goldberg.
Waltz apparently set up the Signal group as a way of bringing together what is known as the principals committee, a jargony term for a group of high-ranking officials. National security experts say using Signal for such discussions completely broke with standard protocol designed to avoid seeing intel fall into the wrong hands.
“The principals committee is really the apex of the national security decision-making process within the US government,” former State Department spokesperson Ned Price told Foreign Policy. “Almost by definition, principals committees take place in the White House Situation Room.” Officials who can’t join in person due to travel can connect via what’s known as SVTC, or secure video teleconference, Price said, which can beam them into the Situation Room.
“If you’re the secretary of state or the secretary of defence, oftentimes you are called upon to be traveling around the world, and that’s totally acceptable and expected. But these principals have teams that will travel ahead of them, set up what are usually tents in their hotel room—or sometimes they go to the embassy—to make sure that they always have access to the top-secret system,” Price said. In extraordinary circumstances, principals can use top-secret phone lines and have their audio beamed into the Situation Room, Price added.
Price, who also previously worked as an intelligence analyst at the CIA and more recently as deputy to the US ambassador to the United Nations, has sat on the principals committee and is baffled that Trump officials apparently held high-level conversations on national security via Signal.
“The idea that this type of discussion would be held on a commercial application that is susceptible to hacking and penetration by state and non-state actors is totally mind-boggling,” Price said. “There is no such thing as secure communication except for one venue, and that is classified US government systems.”
