Senate Intelligence Hearing Couldn't Come At Worst Time For GOP Leaders As War Texts Leak Dominates News

Several intelligence leaders are set to testify before Congress after The Atlantic Editor in Chief was accidentally added to a group chat in which top government officials discussed military plans.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe will face questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday morning and the House on Wednesday. Other officials include FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Jeffrey Kruse and Timothy Haugh, head of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service.

Gabbard and Ratcliffe were among the 18 individuals who participated in the text chain that took place on the encrypted messaging app Signal, a group that Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist, said also included Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and security adviser Michael Waltz.

The National Security Council confirmed the authenticity of the message thread on Monday, saying it was "reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain." President Trump denied any knowledge of the incident when asked on Monday, and Hegseth told reporters that "nobody was texting war plans.'

The Congress meetings had been previously scheduled to focus on the latest edition of an annual assessment of worldwide threats to U.S. national security, mainly from China, Russia and Iran. But ever since The Atlantic's story broke, it is expected that this will now take priority.

The hearings come as top Democrats on prominent House committees sent a letter to four White House officials whom The Atlantic identified as potentially being in the Signal chat, asking for answers about the information shared.

"We are specially concerned that the reported deliberations may have constituted a security breach, because they relied upon an electronic messaging application that is not approved as a secure method for communicating classified information and because they inadvertently included at least one non-governmental party," read the letter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Hegseth, Waltz and Gabbard.

Separately, a group of 14 Senate Democrats sent a letter to Trump, calling the situation "an astonishingly cavalier approach to national security."

"It does not take imagination to consider the likely ramifications if this information had been made public prior to the strike— or worse, if it had been shared with or visible to an adversary rather than a reporter who seems to have a better grasp of how to handle classified information than you National Security Advisor," the senators wrote.

Goldberg told NPR that he was not vetted before being added to the Signal group chat, where he was exposed to "operational military information" with details including targets, weapons and attack sequencing. Such conversations are supposed to take place in what's known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), a secure room that top-ranking officials have in their offices and homes.

National security experts have voiced alarm that they instead used a publicly available messaging app. In fact, a 2023 Department of Defense memo specifically cited Signal as an example of an "unmanaged" messaging app that is not authorized to transmit non-public DOD information.