The Pentagon and intelligence community have continued to reel over the Trump administration‘s leak of deliberations, plans, and strike details pertaining to recent U.S. military action against the Yemen-based Houthi organization.
The leak occurred when the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally included in a chat thread on the Signal messaging app. The thread involved 17 senior Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
Thus far, the administration’s response to the leak has been distinctly “swamptastic.”
Rather than admitting a major error and attempting to mitigate the damage, Hegseth and other administration officials have said the leak jeopardized no classified information and that the media are creating a storm in a teapot. This is a deeply unserious response. Indeed, in its disdain for taking responsibility and the basic realities of national security, the Trump administration is emulating former President Joe Biden’s disastrously incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The central problem here is that the chat thread manifestly included classified information up to the top secret level, including policy discussions related to Europe, the Houthi threat, and military plans and operations. But the most undeniably top secret content in the thread pertained to Hegseth’s posting of the launch times and general target sets for F-18 fighter jets targeting Houthi positions.
Trump administration officials and congressional Republicans have disputed this contention. They have said because the specific location of the Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier (hosting the F-18s), the F-18s’ route to target, and the specific targets were not leaked, the chat did not include classified material.
They are wrong.
After all, the Houthis had a rough idea of where the Truman was operating based on intelligence they and their partners, such as Iran and perhaps Russia, gathered. More importantly, as Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) noted on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the Houthis possess the S-A3 and S-A6 missile systems. These systems pose a proven threat. SA-3s shot down an F-117 stealth jet and an F-16 fighter jet during the 1999 NATO action against Yugoslavia. The Houthis have also used these systems to bring down U.S. drones operating over Yemen.
GABBARD AND RATCLIFFE TO BE GRILLED OVER SIGNAL GROUP CHAT THAT EXPOSED HOUTHI PLANS TO REPORTER
The notion, then, that the Houthis could not increase their probability of bringing down an F-18 if they had access to the information Goldberg had access to is beyond absurd. This absurdity underlines why details of the F-18s’ launch times and even generalized target sets (Houthi leaders) obviously met the criteria to be deemed classified at the top secret level. Anything else would have produced an unacceptable threat to naval aviator lives and the mission.
Put another way, Trump administration officials should stop whining that Goldberg’s reporting is fake news. In this scenario, they are the ones offering fake news.