The Atlantic published details of a Signal conversation US national security adviser Mike Waltz had with Donald Trump’s secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, in which bombing targets in Yemen were discussed in plain text, accompanied by a timeline of the strikes.
The US administration downplayed the conversation, with the White House calling the contents of the chat non-classified, while The Atlantic stated that the name of a specific CIA intelligence officer was redacted.
Democratic and Republican politicians criticised the incident, with Sen. Mark Warner calling it a pattern of “an amazing cavalier attitude towards classified information,” while Rhode Island’s Sen. Jack Reed said it was “one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense [he] had ever seen.”
Trump himself called the incident a “glitch,” despite the apparent threat to intelligence operations.