Senator Rips John Ratcliffe For Not Knowing How Journalist Ended Up in Signal Chat: 'You're The CIA Director!'

The Senate Intelligence Committee held a public hearing on Tuesday regarding global threats, but discussions were dominated by concerns over the security breach involving a Signal group chat that included high-ranking Trump administration officials.

The chat, which contained discussions about a military strike on Yemen, also included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, raising questions about the handling of classified information.

During a portion of the session, Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) confronted CIA Director John Ratcliffe over his inability to explain how Goldberg was added to the chat.

"Did he create a hoax that allowed him to be part of this Signal thread?" Bennet asked Ratcliffe who hesitated before responding, "I don't know how he was invited." Bennet pressed further, pointing out that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz had invited Goldberg and questioning why Ratcliffe, as CIA Director, was unaware of this:

Bennet: You don't know that the President's National Security advisor invited him to join the Signal thread? Everybody in America knows that. Does the CIA director not know that?
Ratcliffe: I've seen conflicting reports about who added the reporter to the Signal messaging group.

At one point of the heated exchange, Bennet lashed out at Ratcliffe's answers by saying: "You're the CIA director! Why didn't you call out that he was present on the Signal thread?", to which Ratcliffe responded by claiming his testimony was being mischaracterized. Bennet then argued that discussing sensitive military plans over an unclassified platform was unacceptable. "This sloppiness, this disrespect for our intelligence agencies is entirely unacceptable," said Bennet. "You need to do better."

Elsewhere in the session, Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized the administration for using a Signal group to discuss plans for carrying out bombing in Yemen, saying that national security adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not "conduct hygiene 101" in failing to realize there was a journalist on the group chat, as The Hill reports.

"There's plenty of declassified information that shows that our adversaries, China and Russia, are trying to break into encrypted systems," Warner said of the messaging app Signal during his opening remarks. "If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired," he added.