Democrats call for investigations and possible resignations after ‘sloppy, careless, incompetent’ Signal blunder – live
Democrats call for investigations and possible resignations after Signal blunder
The Senate briefing on national security threats has ended.
Democrats called for further investigations and possible resignations a day after top national security officials texted military plans to a group chat that included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine.
Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado told CIA director John Ratcliffe that the leak was an “embarrassment” and asked whether it was “just a normal day at the CIA”.
Senators will reconvene in closed setting at 12.40pm ET, where lawmakers are expected to discuss the Signal leak in greater detail.
Key events
The Republican Senate majority leader John Thune said on Tuesday he expects the Senate armed services committee will look into Trump administration officials’ use of Signal, after a journalist said he had been included in a secret group discussion of highly-sensitive war plans on the messaging app.
Fran Lawther
Republicans so far keep rallying around the group of senior Trump officials being criticized for discussing operational details for bombing Yemen in a group chat.
Texas senator Ted Cruz told the BBC that Americans should feel “very encouraged” by the substance of the discussion in the Signal group.
While admitting the security breach – where a journalist was inadvertently added to the group – Cruz told the BBC: “What the entire text thread is about is President Trump directed his national security team take out the terrorists and open up the shipping lanes. That’s terrific.”
Cruz was echoing the official White House line of defense. A statement released on Tuesday afternoon said: “Democrats and their media allies have seemingly forgotten that President Donald J Trump and his national security team successfully killed terrorists who have targeted US troops and disrupted the most consequential shipping routes in the world.”
Joseph Gedeon
Trump campaign chief sues Daily Beast over defamation claims
A top campaign manager for Donald Trump’s victorious 2024 presidential bid has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast, alleging the news outlet fabricated claims about his campaign compensation and deliberately damaged his professional reputation.
Chis LaCivita’s lawsuit, filed on Monday in the US district court for the eastern district of Virginia, centers on a series of articles published in October 2024 claiming that he received up to $22m from the campaign and associated political action committees.
The case also forms part of a larger, dizzying pattern of legal confrontations between Trump as well as those in his orbit and media organizations, following similar high-profile defamation suits against major news networks. Over the years, Trump and his allies have increasingly used litigation as a tool to challenge journalistic reporting they view as hostile or inaccurate.
According to the court filing, the Daily Beast published multiple articles in 2024 suggesting LaCivita had “raked in” huge payments, including a piece by the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff that was titled Trump In Cash Crisis – As Campaign Chief’s $22m Pay Revealed.
LaCivita alleges the reporting created a “false impression that he was personally profiting excessively” and prioritizing personal gain over campaign success – which they argue has harmed his personal reputation. The lawsuit – which does not name Isikoff as a defendant – claims the multimillion-dollar figure represents gross campaign advertising expenditures, not personal income.
After initial correction demands from LaCivita’s legal team, the Daily Beast modified its reporting, reducing the claimed compensation to $19.2m and clarifying that funds went to LaCivita’s consulting firm. However, the lawsuit argues these changes did not adequately address the fundamental misrepresentation.
Read the full story by The Guardian’s Joseph Gedeon here:
Faisal Ali
Earlier today, Democratic lawmaker Rashida Tlaib described Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student who was detained by US immigration authorities earlier this month, as a “political prisoner”.
Speaking alongside several other progressive Democrats, Tlaib said: “In the United States of America, no matter your immigration status, no matter who you are, you have constitutional rights in our country.”
Tlaib said that Khalil’s detention was illegal and a “direct assault” on due process, freedom of speech, and the right to protest in the US, warning that the Trump administration could begin targeting his other opponents. “This is a moment that should alarm all of us. If we do not stand up for Mahmoud’s freedom today, the lawless Trump administration will come for us all.”
The White House released a statement calling out Democrats and their “media allies” for allegedly forgetting the results of the attack on Yemen.
“This is a coordinated effort to distract from the successful actions taken by President Trump and his administration to make America’s enemies pay and keep Americans safe”, reads the statement.
Trump nominates Republican once accused of mishandling taxpayer funds as HHS watchdog
President Donald Trump has nominated a Republican attorney who was once accused of mishandling taxpayer funds and has a history of launching investigations against abortion clinics to lead the Department of Health and Human Services’ office of inspector general, the Associated Press reports.
If confirmed by the Senate, Thomas March Bell will oversee fraud, waste and abuse audits of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which spend more than $1tn annually.
Bell currently serves as general counsel for House Republicans and has worked for GOP politicians and congressional offices for decades.
The president’s nomination is a brazenly political one for a job that has long been viewed as non-partisan and focuses largely on accounting for and ferreting out fraud in some of the nation’s biggest spending programs.
President Trump’s Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow when he was included in a group chat with more than a dozen other top administration officials on the messaging app Signal, including a journalist who leaked the conversation.
Witkoff was in Moscow meeting Russian president Vladimir Putin, but it was not clear if he had his phone with him. Witkoff flew out of Moscow on 14 March, according to Russian media.
Bart Groothuis, a former head of Dutch cyber security, said western government officials would not take mobile phones with them to Moscow or Beijing, but use “burner phones” or secure means of communication to make calls.
“Taking your own phone means giving them a free lunch when it comes to intelligence collection from the Russian side,” he said.
José Olivares
Trump administration claims details of mass deportations are state secrets
The Trump administration invoked the “state secrets” privilege to avoid providing more information to a federal judge regarding this month’s highly contentious immigrant expulsions to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
The administration’s invocation of the privilege is a further escalation in Donald Trump’s immigration-related battle against the federal judiciary.
According to a court filing submitted by justice department officials on Monday evening, “no further information will be provided” to the federal court in Washington DC based on the state secrets privilege. The filing said the case deals with Trump’s complete and absolute authority to remove “designated terrorists participating in a state-sponsored invasion of, and predatory incursion into, the United States”.
In response to the Trump administration’s invocation, the federal judge in the case said that if the administration would like to provide more information about the Alien Enemies Act operation, they should do so by 31 March.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act on 15 March to expel Venezuelan immigrants in the US. That day, 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadoran men were placed on planes and sent to El Salvador, where they were then quickly detained in a massive “terrorism” prison run by the Salvadorian government. For over a week, a federal judge has attempted to compel the Trump administration to release information about the operation.
The Trump administration has said all of the Venezuelans expelled are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, and has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the gang “infiltrated” the US at the direction of the Venezuelan government. An intelligence document contradicts the Trump administration’s allegations. News reports, identifying some of the Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador, have published evidence and claims from family members that they are innocent and not members of the gang.
After the expulsion of the immigrants, federal judge James E Boasberg temporarily blocked the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act for further renditions. In a later court order, Boasberg doubled down on the block, instructing the federal government to conduct individualized hearings for immigrants set to be expelled via the act, to see if it even applies to them at all.
Read the full story by the Guardian’s José Olivares here:
During an interview with the Bulwark, the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg weighed in on whether he’ll release more Signal texts after he was included in a group chat with the US vice president and other White House officials discussing upcoming military strikes in Yemen.
“My colleagues and I and the people who are giving us advice on this have some interesting conversations to have about this”, Goldberg said. “But just because they’re irresponsible with material, doesn’t mean that I’m going to be irresponsible with this material”.
Hillary Clinton reacts to military plans leak: ‘You have got to be kidding me’
Ramon Antonio Vargas
Hillary Clinton – the former US secretary of state who lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump amid a scandal over her use of a private server for classified emails – reacted to Monday’s news of a leak of highly sensitive military plans at the White House by saying: “You have got to be kidding me.”
Clinton punctuated her reaction on the X platform with an eyes emoji and a link to an Atlantic article that revealed how Trump officials inadvertently broadcast plans of US airstrikes on Houthi rebels through a Signal group chat with a journalist reading along.
Trump and his supporters criticized her ruthlessly for her classified emails and private server use before and after he defeated her in the presidential election nine years earlier, even calling for her to be imprisoned.
Among them were some of the participants in the group chat reported on by the Atlantic: the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; the Central Intelligence Agency director, John Ratcliffe; and the national security adviser, Mike Waltz.
“If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now,” ex-Fox News host Hegseth said on his former network in 2016, as CNN showed in a montage which went viral Monday night.
That same year, Rubio remarked on Fox: “Nobody is above the law – not even Hillary Clinton, even though she thinks she is.”
In 2019, Ratcliffe told Fox: “Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the Espionage Act.”
And in a 2023 CNN appearance, Waltz complained about the lack of prosecution over “the Clinton emails”.
Read the full story by the Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas here:
Republican representative Don Bacon of Nebraska said that there’s “no doubt” that Russia and China were monitoring the US officials’ devices used for a war plan text chat.
“I will guarantee you, 99.99% with confidence, Russia and China are monitoring those two phones,” Bacon said in an interview with CNN. “So I just think it’s a security violation, and there’s no doubt that Russia and China saw this stuff within hours of the actual attacks on Yemen or the Houthis.”
Bacon has also said he would defer to the White House on whether defense secretary Pete Hegseth or national security adviser Michael Waltz should face repercussions over war plans that were texted in a group chat that included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine.
“But I think we should be critical,” he said.
“The fact that classified information was put on an unclassified system, I think the secretary of defense needs to answer for that,” Bacon added.
Democrats call for investigations and possible resignations after Signal blunder
The Senate briefing on national security threats has ended.
Democrats called for further investigations and possible resignations a day after top national security officials texted military plans to a group chat that included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine.
Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado told CIA director John Ratcliffe that the leak was an “embarrassment” and asked whether it was “just a normal day at the CIA”.
Senators will reconvene in closed setting at 12.40pm ET, where lawmakers are expected to discuss the Signal leak in greater detail.
Signal president defends app’s security after White House blunder
The president of Signal defended the messaging app’s security after top Trump administration officials mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted chatroom they used to discuss a looming US attack on Yemen’s Houthis, Reuters reports.
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker did not directly address the blunder, which Democratic lawmakers have said was a breach of US national security. But she described the app as the “gold standard in private comms” in a post on X, which outlined Signal’s security advantages over Meta’s WhatsApp messaging app.
“We’re open source, nonprofit, and we develop and apply (end-to-end encryption) and privacy-preserving tech across our system to protect metadata and message contents,” she said.
I wouldn’t say that Will and I are battling but I do disagree. Because there are big differences between Signal and WhatsApp.
Signal is the gold standard in private comms. We’re open source, nonprofit, and we develop and apply e2ee and privacy preserving tech across our system… https://t.co/ZU60z2vVHy
— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) March 25, 2025
Democratic senator Mark Kelly of Arizona pressed Gabbard and Ratcliffe on whether the information on the Signal chat was classified or not.
“Decisional strike deliberations should be conducted through classified channels,” Ratcliffe said, answering Kelly’s question as to whether or not launching a strike on another country counts as classified information.
Tulsi Gabbard avoids questions about Signal group chat
Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard dodged questions about her involvement in the Signal group chat to which an Atlantic journalist was added.
“Senator, I don’t want to get into this,” Gabbard said when Senator Mark Warner asked if she had participated in the chat.
She has repeatedly said there was no classified information in the conversation.
Meanwhile, FBI director Kash Patel declined to say whether the bureau would investigate claims that cabinet members improperly leaked national security information in the chat.
“I was just briefed about it late last night, this morning. I don’t have an update,” said Patel.
Warner asked for an update “by the end of the day”.
Senator Angus King pressed director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on why climate change was not included as a national security threat in the report.
“We recognize environmental changes and their potential impact on operations, but our focus remains on the direct threats to people’s health, wellbeing, and security,” Gabbard said.
King rebutted by saying that climate change exacerbates mass migration, famine, displacement and political violence.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, should resign amid Monday’s leak.
Wyden called the Signal chat “obviously reckless, obviously dangerous, both the mishandling of classified information and the deliberate destruction of federal records or potential crimes that ought to be investigated immediately”.
“I’m of the view that there ought to be resignation, starting with the national security adviser and the secretary of defense, Director Radcliffe and Director Gabbard,” Wyden said.
CIA director says he was briefed he could use Signal for work and that it was used by Biden administration
Democratic senator Mark Warner grilled Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence and CIA director John Ratcliffe about the chat that discussed war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen.
Gabbard claims that “there was no classified material” in the Signal chat.
Ratcliffe said that, when he was confirmed as CIA director, he was briefed by agency officials about “the use of Signal as a permissible work use” and “a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration”.
Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, delivered the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, listing China’s military, Mexico’s drug trade and Russia’s nuclear weapons among some of the most alarming threats to the country’s national security.
Before FBI director Kash Patel began his remarks, a protester yelled “Stop funding Israel!”
The committee’s Republican chair, Tom Cotton, called the protester a “lunatic”.
