Secretary of Defense Hegseth says ‘nobody’s texting war plans’
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said “nobody’s texting war plans” and pushed back against the characterization of the leaked information.
President Donald Trump and his administration raised eyebrows about how they handled sensitive national security information long before his top national security advisor added a journalist to a Signal chat.
Security experts say sharing detailed plans for attacking the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen with a journalist from the Atlantic is part of a larger problem involving Trump and his security team’s overall handling of sensitive information.
“The sloppiness of their security is pervasive,” Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute,” told USA TODAY. Schake said CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claims that the time, date, and weapons used were not classified information is “staggering.”
Mike Williams, an international relations professor at Syracuse University who has consulted the Department of Defense, said repeated national security lapses can create a culture of complacency at best or neglect at worse.
“Or it creates a culture whereby this becomes permissible and then you have more and more such leakages and then it’s only a matter of time before something gets out there,” Williams said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s record on information security.
“It is something that is not a big deal other than you want to find out who did it and how they did it because you don’t want it to happen in the future,” Trump said on Tuesday about Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg being added to the Signal chat in which Vice President JD Vance and Cabinet members planned the attack.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday, “The real story here is the overwhelming success of President Trump’s decisive military action.”
Here is a look at six other times that Trump’s handling of sensitive national security information raised concerns.
A dining room phone call
Less than a month into his first term in 2017, Trump took a phone call about a North Korean missile launch while sitting in the middle of a dining area at Mar-a-Lago, according to CNN. He was sitting next to the prime minister of Japan, while club members “looked on from their tables.”
Israeli intelligence
In 2017, the Washington Post revealed that Trump shared highly classified intelligence on the Islamic State with Russia. The intelligence came from Israel, one of the U.S.’s top allies, and Trump said he shared facts but quickly denied ever naming Israel as the source.
Personal cell phone
In 2018, a New York Times investigation revealed that Russian and Chinese spies were routinely listening to his calls to old friends via a specific iPhone of Trump’s. Trump said he had “one seldom used government phone” and called the report “so incorrect I do not have time to correct it.”
Jared Kushner’s security clearance
Trump overruled intelligence officials in 2018 to grant his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top secret security clearance, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Trump’s chief of staff at the time, John Kelly, documented the request in an internal memo because he was so uncomfortable with the situation, the reports said.
Private calls with heads of state
Shortly after winning the November 2024 election, Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin and about 70 other world leaders, the Washington Post reported. The calls raised alarms in the foreign policy community because he spoke directly with the leaders, without secure phone lines set up, without staff from the State Department, and without government interpreters.
Mar-a-Lago documents
Upon leaving the White House after his 2020 election loss, Trump brought classified information with him to his estate in Mar-a-Lago, according to a criminal indictment that a federal grand jury handed down in 2023. His new administration’s Department of Justice dropped the case against him based on a longstanding policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.
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