A new survey has found that 74 percent of Americans, including 60 percent of Republicans, believe that the national security breach now referred to as Signalgate was “serious.:
The poll, conducted Tuesday by YouGov, asked people about Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, being inadvertently added to a group chat on the Signal messaging app with senior White House officials discussing logistics for a bomb attack in Yemen.
The group, which included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, discussed American military plans to attack the Houthi rebel group, referring to specific times and targets. The bombing occurred hours later after the chat March 15.
According to the poll of almost 6,000 Americans, 53 percent of respondents said the incident was a “very serious” problem, while 21 percent said it was a “somewhat serious” problem.
Respondents on both sides of the political aisle were concerned by the breach. The poll found 89 percent of Democrats thought it was a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, compared with 72 percent of Independents. Sixty percent of Republicans agreed.
In the same poll, 48 percent of those surveyed said they believed Trump officials broke the law by sharing the secret information. This included 76 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Independents.
However, just 21 percent of Republicans thought the action was illegal.
On Wednesday, Trump dismissed the incident as “really not a big deal,” after doubling down on his defense on Tuesday of National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who launched the Signal chat, and branding Goldberg a “loser.”
More Americans view the Signal blunder as being as problematic than those who considered Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official business as problematic, Forbes noted.
A similar poll, conducted in September 2022, found that 62 percent of those surveyed, including 40 percent of Democrats and 88 percent of Republicans, said Clinton’s behavior was a very serious or a somewhat serious problem.
The former Secretary of State and presidential candidate responded to news of the Signal chat leak in a post on X, writing: “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
