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Signalgate: Trump Houthi attack plan leak updates - US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and some other officials have been sued over the leak of American military plans targeting Houthi rebels in Yeman, after a journalist was mistakenly added to an official Signal chat group that discussed the strike.
While US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has taken responsibility for adding The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the secret chat group, the fallout is far from over. Hegseth has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and insisted that no war plans or classified information was shared with the journalist.
Huffington Post reported that the lawsuit filed by the group American Oversight on Tuesday (Mar 25) targets Hegseth and other Trump administration officials.
It asked that a federal judge declare that Hegseth and other officials "violated their duty to uphold laws around the preservation of official communications."
'Nobody was texting war plans': Hegseth denies sharing Yemen war plans, calls journalist 'deceitful'
The laws regarding this are enshrined in the Federal Records Act, which states that if agency heads refuse to recover or protect their communications, the national archivist should ask the attorney general to step in.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was also in the chat group, is the acting national archivist.
Signalgate: What really happened?
Michael Waltz, the US NSA, inadvertently added Goldberg to a Signal group chat with more than a dozen officials and aides. Besides Waltz and Hegseth, the group included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, homeland security adviser Stephen Miller, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
During a grilling by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the matter was “still under review,” without answering whether she was in the chat group or not.
The lawsuit said Rubio “is aware of the violations” and “responsible for initiating an investigation through the Attorney General for the recovery of records or other redress,” as per the HuffPost report.
Goldberg, in an article on The Atlantic, revealed he got messages for more than two days, but only shared a portion of the chats. He wrote that these texts were procedural, policy talks, till March 15, the day Trump ordered attacks on Yemen targeting Houthis.
Hegseth shared war plans and discussed specific targets, weapons, and attack sequencing of the Centcom strikes.
Though he had received such information, Goldberg avoided sharing the strike plans in his article.
But he added: “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.”
Who is Jeffrey Goldberg? The journalist accidentally sent classified Yemen war plan
On Monday, the National Security Council said the message thread “appears to be authentic.”
The HuffPost report quoted American Oversight executive director Chioma Chukwu, who found several aspects of the issue deeply troubling.
The chat had an automatic delete feature switched on.
But, that could be a potential violation of The Federal Records Act, which mandates agency heads to “make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency,” as per the American Oversight lawsuit.
“What the Trump administration did was simply dangerous, reckless and irresponsible and frankly, a direct threat to our national security because we know, as has been reported, that increasingly state-backed hackers are trying to find their ways into Signal chats,” Chukwu was quoted as saying in the HuffPost report.
(With inputs from agencies)