The White House effort to defend Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday leaned heavily into a semantic argument. What he posted on the now-infamous Signal chat with his national security colleagues, Mr. Hegseth and other administration officials insist, was not a “war plan.”
Technically, they were right. What The Atlantic published, from the chain in which its top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently included, is more like a timeline of a pending attack. But it is so detailed — with the time that F/A-18F Super Hornet jets were supposed to launch and the time that MQ-9 Reaper drones would fly in from land bases in the Middle East — that the answer may prove a distinction without a difference.
A full “war plan” would undoubtedly be more specific, with the routings of weaponry and coordinates for targets. But that is not likely to help the defense secretary as he tries to explain away why he put these details on an unclassified commercial app that, while encrypted, was far from the heavily protected, classified internal systems used by the Pentagon.
The publication of the timeline on Wednesday morning — which the administration all but encouraged by declaring so vociferously that none of the information on the chat was classified — only accelerated the calls by Democrats for Mr. Hegseth to resign.
The time stamps he included in his messages, hours before the attack began, were critical: Had this information leaked out, the Houthi fighters and missile experts the United States was targeting in Yemen might have had time to escape, and American pilots and other service members could have been put at risk. Mr. Hegseth’s own references in the Signal chain to “OPSEC” — or operational security — indicated he fully understood the need to keep this timing secret.
And the level of detail was striking: “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package),” Mr. Hegseth wrote in the chat. “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).”
Clearly this is the most sensitive of battlefield plans, which adversaries could use to avoid being hit, or to ready themselves to attack American forces. “It’s by the awesome grace of God that we are not mourning dead pilots right now,” Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, said at a hearing Wednesday morning with top intelligence officials, some of whom were part of the Signal chat.
National security veterans say it is almost farcical to argue that this was not classified data, at least when Mr. Hegseth sent details of the plan to the group chat. It was so sensitive that in most administrations it would even be kept off most classified systems. The debate that played out over Signal would typically be confined to the Situation Room, with just a few officials dialing in from secure locations, over specially protected, government-owned lines.
Yet the question of classification has been at the heart of the Trump administration’s explanations for why the Signal chat was a minor transgression.
“So this was not classified,” President Trump insisted during a meeting with U.S. ambassadors at the White House on Tuesday. “Now if it’s classified information, it’s probably a little bit different, but I always say, you have to learn from every experience.”
(His tone, and perhaps his view, had changed by Wednesday. Asked by reporters if he still believed there had been no sharing of classified information, Mr. Trump said, “That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know. I’m not sure — you have to ask the various people involved.”)
The White House and national security officials will not say whether the timing data was ever declassified, who made that determination or, crucially, whether they did so after the attack was over — and after The Atlantic’s revelations were published.
Mr. Hegseth, in another encounter with reporters traveling with him to Asia, avoided any questions on Wednesday, especially the key one: Why did he put the strike data on a commercial app whose servers are outside the United States? Instead, he blamed the Biden administration for not striking the Houthis harder and said “nobody’s texting war plans.”
“There’s no units, no location, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information.” He omitted the obvious: The timing and targets were included.
But clearly the White House had decided that if the facts wouldn’t win the day, semantic gymnastics might. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, made the case that Mr. Hegseth, a former National Guard infantryman and television commentator who has made a series of missteps in his first two months in office, did nothing wrong. And she sought to impugn The Atlantic, which had initially not published the specific information about the attacks out of concern that they could be classified and have national security implications, and only did so after the administration repeatedly insisted that the material was not classified and disputed Mr. Goldberg’s characterization of the contents of the text chain.
“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,’” Ms. Leavitt wrote on X after The Atlantic used the phrase “attack plans” to describe them. “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”
Leaving aside her attacks on Mr. Goldberg, who has covered national security affairs for several decades, Ms. Leavitt’s blast was openly contradicted by the director of the C.I.A., John Ratcliffe, in testimony in front of a Senate committee on Tuesday.
He acknowledged that the Signal chain, in which he was a participant, was real, and Mr. Goldberg’s description of it was accurate. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who at first tried to evade questions about the Signal chain, later agreed, once Mr. Ratcliffe confirmed his participation.
Both said the information was not classified. But when pressed, they amended their comments to say there was no classified intelligence information in the chat — meaning they were not commenting on whether there were classified Pentagon operational plans.
But to truth-test their comments, consider this one, common-sense question: Had a news organization gone to the Pentagon or the National Security Council before the attack, and said it was considering publishing this kind of timing and detail, would the administration have asked it to withhold the information because it could have compromised the attack? Or because it could have put American pilots at risk if the Houthis, with their missile capabilities, knew they were coming?
The administration almost certainly would have asked them not to publish — and most responsible news organizations would have held that data back, at least until the attack was over. It is a scenario that has played out many times in the past few years, involving everything from operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to attacks on Syrian and Iranian sites.
All of which makes it all the more mystifying that more than 18 Trump administration officials discussed that timing on a commercial if encrypted app, one they normally use to bounce around ideas, or discuss sensitive but unclassified ideas. Or that they seem to have no sense of irony that, less than a decade ago, they were outraged that a Democratic former secretary of state running for president had put far less important data on a computer server in her home.
