Taylor Swift’s name was mentioned during a U.S. Senate hearing about the leaked Signal chat that showed high-ranking security officials discussing plans to bomb Yemen.
During the Tuesday, March 25, hearing, Virginia Senator Mark Warner cited Swift, 35, while discussing the dangers of alienating international allies. Warner, 70, pointed to Swift’s cancellation of three Vienna concerts last year as an example of the importance of properly handling and sharing classified information.
“That sharing of information saves lives, and it’s not hypothetical,” Warner told the Senate Intelligence Committee. “We all remember, because it was declassified — last year when Austria worked with our community to make sure to expose a plot against Taylor Swift in Vienna that could have killed literally hundreds of individuals.”
As Swifties will remember, the Grammy winner canceled three planned concerts at the Austrian capital’s Ernst Happel Stadium after officials uncovered an alleged terror plot inspired by ISIS. Swift addressed the situation a few weeks later, explaining that she waited a bit to break her silence because of the highly sensitive nature of the incident.
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“Let me be very clear: I am not going to speak about something publicly if I think doing so might provoke those who would want to harm the fans who come to my shows,” she wrote via Instagram in August 2024. “In cases like this one, ‘silence’ is actually showing restraint, and waiting to express yourself at a time when it’s right to. My priority was finishing our European tour safely, and it is with great relief that I can say we did that.”
She noted that canceling the concerts was “devastating” but thanked officials for their work. “The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows,” she wrote. “But I was also so grateful to the authorities because thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives. I was heartened by the love and unity I saw in the fans who banded together.”
News broke on Monday, March 24, that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and other officials in President Donald Trump’s administration discussed plans to attack Houthi militants in Yemen in a group chat on the messaging app Signal. The chats leaked because the group chat allegedly included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, who published a story about the incident on Monday. The National Security Council later said that the chat “appears to be authentic.”
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Trump, 78, downplayed the leak on Tuesday, claiming that the information shared in the group chat was not mishandled because it was not classified.
“So this was not classified,” Trump said during a White House meeting with U.S. ambassadors, per The New York Times. “Now if it’s classified information, it’s probably a little bit different, but I always say, you have to learn from every experience.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, said on Monday that the leak is “one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence I have read about in a very, very long time.”
