Gabbard, Ratcliffe face fresh questions from House on Yemen war chats

The more complete transcript showed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted in the chat a detailed timeline of the planned strikes and listed the weapons to be used – including F-18 fighters, MQ-9 Reaper drones and sea-launched Tomahawk missiles. The magazine published the transcript a day after the administration’s top spy chiefs had insisted, under oath before a Senate panel, that the chats contained no classified information.
The Atlantic magazine, which this week revealed the existence of the chat group to which its editor in chief was inadvertently added, published portions of the messages it had previously withheld.
U.S. intelligence chiefs faced new questions from Congress on Wednesday after the publication of additional text chains indicating that the Trump administration’s top national security officials shared detailed plans for an air attack on Yemen over a commercial messaging app.
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Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee immediately seized on those statements Wednesday morning as the same spy chiefs again took the witness stand for what was supposed to be a routine annual hearing on the biggest threats facing the United States.
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Instead, Rep. Jim Himes (Connecticut), the top Democrat on the committee, read back the previous day’s testimony to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe – who, along with Vice President JD Vance, national security adviser Michael Waltz and others, had participated in the group chat.
Senators had asked the officials on Tuesday whether the Signal chat included “information on weapons packages, targets or timing,” to which Gabbard responded that she couldn’t recall, Himes noted.
He then read aloud from a text message from Hegseth that was contained in the fuller transcript published Wednesday morning:
“TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch
1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)
1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)
1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
Himes looked up: “Do either of the directors want to reflect on their testimony yesterday?”
“My answer yesterday was based on my recollection, or the lack thereof,” Gabbard said.
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“So … less than two weeks ago, you were on a Signal chat that had all of this information about F-18s and MQ-9 Reapers and targets on strike, and you, in that two-week period, simply forgot that that was there?” Himes asked. “That’s your testimony?”
“My testimony is I did not recall the exact details of what was included there,” Gabbard said.
Himes then quizzed Gabbard on her familiarity with her office’s own classification guidance for information, after she claimed again Tuesday that the information in the Signal chat was not classified.
Himes read aloud from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s classification guidance.
“I’m reading from your classification guidance, and the criteria is ‘information providing indication or advance warning that the U.S. or its allies are preparing an attack.’ Do you recall what [level] your own guidance would suggest that that be classified?” Himes asked.
“I don’t have the specifics in front of me,” Gabbard responded.
“Let me help you,” Himes said. According to the guidance governing the classification criteria from Gabbard’s office, such information “should be classified as top secret,” he said.
The new details of the leak, published an hour before the House Intelligence hearing, triggered an immediate escalation in the chorus of Democratic lawmakers calling for the resignations of Hegseth, Waltz and other chat participants.
“Crime and cover up, all in one,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (Virginia), the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote on X. “This entire team needs to go – right now.” Connolly is among the dozens of senior Democratic lawmakers who by the end of the day Wednesday had demanded that Hegseth and Waltz testify before Congress.
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“The idea that this information, if it was presented to our committee, would not be classified, you all know, is a lie,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), another member of the committee, said to Gabbard, Ratcliffe and other officials Wednesday during the hearing.
“That’s ridiculous,” Castro continued. “I’ve seen things much less sensitive be presented to us with high classification, and to say that it isn’t is a lie to the country.”
Gabbard acknowledged Wednesday that inadvertently including a journalist on the Signal chat was a “mistake,” and she told the House committee that Waltz “has taken full responsibility” for the incident and that the National Security Council is conducting an in-depth review of what happened.
It was a greater degree of contrition shown than in the previous day’s hearing, even as Gabbard tried to distance herself from the scandal, saying she was “not playing a very specific role” in the group chat. She reiterated the claim that the information shared there was not classified.
She also cited a lawsuit, filed Tuesday by the government watchdog group American Oversight, as a reason that she was “limited in [her] ability to comment further on that specific case.”
The lawsuit – which names Gabbard, Hegseth, Ratcliffe and other chat participants – alleges that they violated federal records laws by using Signal for high-level national security deliberations. The lawsuit also seeks “to prevent the unlawful destruction of federal records.”
According to screenshots of the fuller transcript of the Signal chat, Waltz set the “disappearing” time on the messages to four weeks, meaning that it should still be intact on the participants’ phones. Officials who delete the messages would be violating U.S. law, the lawsuit says.
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The House intelligence hearing grew deeply contentious at times Wednesday, as Democrats and Ratcliffe repeatedly shouted over one another. The committee’s Republican chairman, Rep. Rick Crawford (Arkansas), came to the defense of the government witnesses and blamed the Biden administration for a “pattern of lapses” in which political motives drove faulty intelligence assessments in recent years.
The intelligence community’s behavior during the Biden administration means now that “many of our citizens lack trust” in U.S. intelligence agencies, Crawford said.
Earlier Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the Atlantic’s reporting a “hoax” and claimed falsely to reporters that the magazine had conceded that the Signal chat messages did not amount to “war plans.” The magazine has not made a statement to that effect.
“I know a lot of folks in this administration were saying that they’re going to take on the establishment and drain the swamp,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-California) told the administration’s senior intelligence officials at the House intelligence hearing. “But you have become that swamp in a matter of days,” he added. “Not weeks or months. Days.”
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan’s frustration erupted when Gabbard reiterated an earlier claim that she was not in a position to comment on the appropriate classification for the information shared over the Signal chat because it fell under the purview of the Defense Department’s classification guidance.
“This chat did not have the auspice of being a DoD chat,” Houlahan (D-Pennsylvania) said in exasperation, waving her hand. “There’s no such thing as labeling it as DoD.” She added that Gabbard, under U.S. law, has “an obligation, when you think there has been a tangible, significant leak of information, to instigate an investigation.”
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Houlahan and other Democrats lamented that their obligation to probe the group chat incident had prevented them from spending their limited question time on the intended subject of the hearing: the intelligence community’s assessment of the gravest national security threats facing the nation.
Republican members of the committee sought periodically on Wednesday to redirect the hearing discussion to that original purpose, but they also took the opportunity to blast Democrats for their questions and to echo the administration’s defense of the Signal incident.
The major national security concerns of the day – including the administration’s focus on confronting drug cartels and the growing cooperation among Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – largely remained, as they had in the Senate committee hearing, overshadowed by what some are now calling “Signal-gate.”
Trump inherited an array of foreign policy challenges when he began his second presidential term in January, including two U.S.-supported war efforts, high levels of illegal migration across America’s southern border, and an increasingly sophisticated and belligerent China.
The United States has funneled billions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine over the past three years to support its fight to expel Russian forces, which invaded the country in 2022, and Trump campaigned in part on bringing an end to that conflict.
But Democrats have warned that the president’s actions and rhetoric during his first two months in office – particularly, friendliness toward Russia and hostility toward traditional adversaries – have only made Americans less safe.
In his opening statement Wednesday, Himes noted that the unclassified report submitted by the officials to his committee in advance of the hearing was reassuring.
“I found a lot of continuity in the [intelligence community’s] assessment about critical threats to our national security,” Himes said. Like last year’s report, intelligence officials remained focused on the “threats from our principal adversaries China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.”
But Trump’s actions tell a different story, Himes said. While the report identifies Russia as “an enduring potential threat to U.S. power, presence and global interests. … As far as I can tell, we’re now on Team Kremlin.”
“I must say,” Himes added, “After these last two months, I’m worried the call may be coming from inside the house.”
Sabrina Rodriguez contributed to this report.