Trump wants to move on from the Signal security scandal. House Republicans aren’t making it easy
Republican national security hawks in the House are not making the White House’s efforts to move on from the “Signalgate” scandal any easier.
As Donald Trump’s team trades blame and battles its critics, members of the House Republican caucus are facing their voters after The Atlantic published proof this past week that editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been mistakenly included in a group chat of Trump administration principals discussing plans for an imminent US strike on Houthi forces. The entire chat played out over Signal, an encrypted (but public) messaging app.
Some members are making it clear that they are not toeing the White House line on the narrative, and disagree with the assertion from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and others claiming that the information sent by Hegseth to others in the chat during the deliberations included material that was or should have been classified. Hegseth’s messages to observers in the chat from the White House, including Vice President JD Vance, included precise attack timings, information about a confidential CIA source, and details about weapons packages used in the attack.
That list includes Mike Turner, former chair of the House Intelligence Committee and one of a limited number of members who had access regularly to classified information and briefings.
Turner, on Sunday, told ABC’s This Week: “Clearly the subject matter that’s being discussed, the status of ongoing military operations, should be … considered classified information.”
“And it’s surprising to find it in an unclassified manner,” he added. “To find it in this way is surprising.”
He’d go on to quibble with how the media had described the text — calling it a description of “ongoing military operations”, rather than “plans”. The chat did include deliberations, however, over whether to even launch the attacks at all, with Vance writing to other principals in the chat: “I think we are making a mistake.”
Another Republican who is breaking with the administration’s line is Victoria Spartz, who served on the Helsinki Commission monitoring European military cooperation.
The Indiana congresswoman faced a raucous town hall over the weekend in her district where attendees shouted at her to demand the resignation of Hegseth and Michael Waltz, the White House national security adviser who set up the text chain and inadvertantly included Goldberg when he did so.
She declined to call for their resignations but did, according to reports, tell her constituents that the information included in Hegseth’s texts was or should have been classified.
As the White House has tried and failed for several days to move on from the story without a formal investigation of the text chain or resignations for anyone involved, it’s become clear that the Signal controversy has broken through to voters nearly overnight.
In State College, Pennsylvania on Saturday residents of a red district represented by Congressman Glenn Thompson angrily ranted to former congressman Conor Lamb, a Democrat, and other members of local government at a town hall meeting put on by the Centre County Democrats. Thompson did not attend, though he was supposedly invited; a cardboard cutout took his place.
Ray Bilger, a Democrat and veteran of the State Department foreign service, told attendees: “Number one, everything they said there was classified. Number two, they violated national security by putting this in an unapproved and unsecure, unsecure application.”
It was reported that Vance and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles pushed the president on Wednesday evening to oust Waltz, but were rebuffed. Trump, fuming at Goldberg, is said to revile the idea of giving the Atlantic’s editor and Democrats a “scalp”.
