WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s top intelligence officials faced senators Tuesday, a day after the disclosure of a major security breach in which Cabinet members mistakenly sent war plans to a journalist.
In a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia denounced what he called a pattern of “careless, incompetent behavior” by the Trump administration with regard to the handling of sensitive information.
“Putting aside for a moment that classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system, it’s also just mind-boggling” that no one thought to check the participants on the group chat, said Warner, the panel’s top Democrat.
Tuesday’s hearing took place one day after news broke that several top national security officials in the Republican administration, including Ratcliffe, Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, texted war plans for military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic.
The text chain “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Goldberg reported. The strikes began two hours after Goldberg received the details.
FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were among the witnesses appearing Tuesday before the Senate panel. Maine’s senators, Republican Susan Collins and independent Angus King, are on the committee. Collins was absent Tuesday due to an illness but would be submitting written questions, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, said.
King, who caucuses with Democrats, asked Gabbard if the details discussed in the chat group are considered classified. Gabbard insisted there were no classified or intelligence-related details included in the texts. She then deferred to the National Security Council and Hegseth when King continued to ask the question.
“Well, you’re the head of the intelligence community, and you’re supposed to know about classifications,” King told Gabbard, also asking her to “please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion.”
The annual hearings on worldwide threats also offered a glimpse of the Trump administration’s reorienting of priorities, which officials across agencies have described as countering the scourge of fentanyl and fighting violent crime, human trafficking and illegal immigration.
Former FBI Director Christopher Wray routinely has said he is hard-pressed to think of a time in his career when the United States faced so many elevated threats at once, but the concerns he more regularly highlighted had to do with sophisticated Chinese espionage plots, ransomware attacks that have crippled hospitals and international and domestic terrorism.
“We have to change to the dynamic threat landscape that is changing constantly not just in America but abroad,” Patel said in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday night.
The hearings are also unfolding against the backdrop of a starkly different approach toward Russia following years of Biden administration sanctions over its war against Ukraine.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed during a lengthy call with President Donald Trump to an immediate pause in strikes against energy infrastructure in what the White House described as the first step in a “movement to peace.”
Story by Eric Tucker and David Klepper, Associated Press. BDN writer Billy Kobin contributed to this report.
