Thursday Briefing: More Signal Texts Released

Excerpts from the Signal chat between President Trump’s top aides.

Newly released Signal texts showed what was at stake

More messages were released yesterday from a Signal group chat between President Trump’s top security officials laying out plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen. The Atlantic — whose editor in chief had been inadvertently added to the group, and who first wrote about the leak on Monday — published a fuller transcript.

The leaked chat led to mounting calls by Democrats for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to step down, saying he had behaved recklessly and could have endangered American troops. Hegseth revealed the precise timing of the strikes on Houthi targets.

Tulsi Gabbard, the national intelligence director, and John Ratcliffe, the head of the C.I.A., faced intense questions during a hearing in Congress. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Hegseth did not offer an apology for the disclosures and insisted that the information shared in the chat was not “war plans.”

My colleague David Sanger, who covers national security, told us that, technically, the exchanges did not include war plans. But Hegseth’s descriptions were so detailed that it may be a distinction without a difference. “Had the chat leaked,” David said, “it could have given advance warning to the Houthis, who could have simply left the site and defeated the mission. They could have also prepared to launch against the planes, which would have put the pilots’ lives at risk.”

Listen: The Atlantic journalist told The Daily what it was like to accidentally get war plans.

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