MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The Trump administration is in damage control mode after the revelation this week that top national security officials shared secret war plans in a group chat that included a journalist. President Trump was asked about it yesterday.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We've pretty much looked into it. It's pretty simple, to be honest. It's not - it's just something that can happen.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were both part of that group chat, and they appeared before Senate lawmakers yesterday for a previously scheduled hearing where they faced tough questions about how this security breach could have happened.
MARTIN: NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas is covering this, and he's with us now with more. Good morning, Ryan.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So Democrats really pushed Gabbard and Ratcliffe on this group chat revelation. Just remind us, what are the security concerns here?
LUCAS: Well, there are a couple of issues here. First off, this group chat reportedly involved sensitive strategy discussions among top U.S. officials, including the vice president. And it also reportedly involved discussions about targeting, about weapons and attack sequencing of U.S. military strikes in Yemen before those airstrikes happened. These discussions weren't on a secure U.S. government communication system. They, instead, were in a group chat set up by national security adviser Mike Waltz on the Signal messaging app, which is commercially available, widely used by all sorts of folks. Our colleague Tom Bowman is reporting that the Pentagon warned, actually, just last week against using Signal, even for unclassified information. The Pentagon said Russian hackers are targeting the app to spy on people of interest. So that's issue No. 1.
Issue No. 2 here is that a journalist, the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was included in this group chat, and that, of course, is a serious security breach.
MARTIN: So what did the director of National Intelligence and the CIA director have to say about this yesterday when they appeared before lawmakers?
LUCAS: Well, initially, Tulsi Gabbard wouldn't even acknowledge that she was in the chat. For his part, though, CIA Director John Ratcliffe didn't try to play that game. He said, straight out, he was part of this chat. But he did say U.S. officials are permitted to use Signal to communicate and coordinate for government work purposes. He and Gabbard said there was no classified information shared in this chat. The White House has said the same thing, but that line received a lot of skepticism from lawmakers on the panel, and that includes Maine independent Angus King.
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ANGUS KING: It's the case, please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion. It's hard for me to believe that targets and timing and weapons would not have been classified.
LUCAS: Now, Ratcliffe and Gabbard both said at one point that the information from an intelligence perspective wasn't classified, but then when it comes to specific military information about the air strikes, they said the secretary of defense has the authority to determine what's classified and what's not on that. So pointing to defense secretary Pete Hegseth for answers on those questions, Hegseth was not at this hearing yesterday, but he has said publicly that nobody was texting war plans.
MARTIN: So what happens next with this?
LUCAS: Well, the same intelligence officials are testifying before House lawmakers today. They'll no doubt face more questions. But stepping back a bit, the top Democrat in the House and Senate are both calling for an investigation. Democrats, of course, don't have a lot of power. They're in the minority. Republicans control both houses of Congress. Some GOP senators have expressed concern about this security breach and how this all went down. That includes the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune. He told reporters yesterday that they need to figure out what happened. So there may be more to come on this.
MARTIN: So let me just mention here that Katherine Maher, who's the CEO of NPR, chairs the board of the nonprofit Signal Foundation. And that is NPR's Ryan Lucas. Ryan, thank you.
LUCAS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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