High-ranking Trump administration officials seem to have committed a severe breach of U.S. national security protocols by sharing United States military plans over an internet app. In doing so, they have potentially violated the Espionage Act.

Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic, reports that “U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.”

Goldberg reports that he received a Signal contact request from someone claiming to be Michael Waltz, President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser. This contact led to Goldberg’s inclusion in a Signal group in which included Vice President Vance, Defense Secretary Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Presidential Advisor Miller, and other national security officials in the Trump administration.

These high-ranking Trump administration members allegedly used this Signal group to discuss national security issues and detailed military plans to bomb the Houthis in Yeman, as well as the motives for, justification of, and timing of the attacks.

Goldberg indicates that “I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.”

“Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of ‘national defense’ information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred,” according to Goldberg.

“All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of ‘national defense’ information, according to Goldberg. “The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.”

Jeffrey Goldberg concludes that “Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.”

This severe security breach clearly warrants both FBI investigation and Congressional hearings.

Historians of war and society and of U.S. national security issues will be following this developing story closely. I will be eager to see how professors and researchers in the Society for Military History respond to this news.

U.S. Representatives and Senators are now responding to the news of these shocking leaks.

“‘I am horrified by reports that our most senior national security officials, including the heads of multiple agencies, shared sensitive and almost certainly classified information via a commercial messaging application, including imminent war plans,’ Democratic Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement,” according to Foreign Policy.

“‘If true, these actions are a brazen violation of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans serving in harm’s way,’ Himes added.”

“Himes emphasized the ‘calamitous risks of transmitting classified information across unclassified systems’ and said he intended to get answers from intelligence officials at a committee hearing scheduled for Wednesday.”

Foreign Policy reports that “Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a statement called for an immediate hearing on ‘what might be the most astonishing breach of our national security in recent history, where top leadership from DOD, State, Treasury, the CIA and even the VP himself used a commercial messaging app—Signal—to communicate U.S. war plans, all the while unaware that a journalist was included in the group chat.'”

“Meeks said that Republicans have ‘regularly contrived security ‘scandals’ to attack their political opponents with years of nakedly partisan hearings and investigations,’ adding that the Trump administration ‘proves yet again that hypocrisy and cynical politics aren’t the only defining characteristics of today’s GOP; rank incompetence is front and center.'”

“Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a post on X decried the administration’s reported actions as ‘blatantly illegal and dangerous beyond belief,'” according to Foreign Policy.

“‘Our national security is in the hands of complete amateurs,’ Warren wrote. ‘What other highly sensitive national security conversations are happening over group chat? Any other random people accidentally added to those, too?'”

Goldberg, Jeffrey. “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” The Atlantic (24 March 2025).

Haltiwanger, John. “‘Horrified’: Trump Cabinet Accidentally Leaking War Plans Prompts Alarm in Washington.” Foreign Policy (24 March 2025).

Cooper, Helen and Eric Schmitt. “Hegseth Disclosed Secret War Plans in a Group Chat.” The New York Times (24 March 2025).

For broader context on the Red Sea situation, see:

Froman, Michael. “The Siege of the Red Sea.” Council on Foreign Relations (21 March 2025).

Note: This post has been updated with additional sources.