After yesterday’s bombshell story of Jeffrey Goldberg being accidentally added to a group chat on military strikes on the Houthi pirates, one of today’s big follow-on fights is the question of what information was shared in the Signal chat and whether it was classified. There’s a direct dispute between Goldberg, who wrote that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s texts “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” and Hegseth, who denies this. (Goldberg insists that he has not published these messages out of concern for national security, although nothing would stop him from sharing them with the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session; the committee would doubtless very much like to see them).
There was a lot of jousting today in an Intelligence Committee hearing, where CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (both participants in the chat) told the Senate panel that the chat didn’t share classified information. To which my response is: who cares? The classification system is useful in flagging for the casual reader what information shouldn’t be shared (and it is also famously promiscuous in its use), but what matters is what information is actually something that should be secret for national security reasons. That’s the legal standard under the Espionage Act, and it’s the practical standard as well. That was the issue during the Hillary emails debate: a hyper focus on what was and wasn’t classified missed the fact that we shouldn’t be giving foreign adversaries an opening to spy in real time on the thinking and scheduling of our nation’s chief diplomat. That’s an intelligence goldmine even if it includes no formally classified information, let alone classified documents. So it is here. The story is, of course, much worse if Goldberg is telling the truth (either he or Hegseth is lying; there’s no middle ground). But even if that part of the story isn’t true, there is hardly a more sensitive fact that we need to keep secret than that senior American policymakers are discussing a surprise military strike. You carefully guard that discussion, whether or not it includes coordinates, targets, methods, or strike times.