Trump Calls Signal Leak Fallout a ‘Witch Hunt’

Days after the leak went public, Mr. Trump and his aides were still trying to downplay it and have yet to establish a coherent narrative.

Last night, Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, said in an appearance on Fox News that he had created the group and would take full responsibility for the leak.

But Mr. Trump and Mr. Waltz have also suggested that Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist inadvertently added to the group chat, may have entered the conversation through some sort of security vulnerability.

“I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you,” Mr. Trump said at the White House on Wednesday. Hours earlier, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Signal was an “approved app” used by several national security agencies, “because it is the most secure and efficient way to communicate.”

Mr. Trump and administration officials had also insisted for days that the information leaked in the Signal chat was not classified. But the president appeared to backtrack on that claim in his Oval Office remarks after the full transcript was released.

Asked if he still believed nothing classified was shared, he responded: “That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know. I’m not sure, you have to ask the various people involved.”

Still, Mr. Trump said that he was ultimately not concerned about the leak, proclaiming that “there was no harm done, because the attack was unbelievably successful.”

The new messages published by The Atlantic showed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared critical details of the upcoming operation: most crucially, the precise timing of the launches from aircraft carriers of the U.S. military jets that were to strike Houthi targets. Mr. Trump claimed Mr. Hegseth, whom Democrats have called on to resign, had no role in the text chain and was doing a “great job.”

Here’s what else to know:

• Hegseth speaks: Mr. Hegseth did not offer an apology in remarks to reporters in Hawaii, relying again on the semantic argument that his disclosures were not “war plans” but had been intended to “provide updates in real time.” He did not address how a disclosure that he released 30 minutes before flights took off and two hours before the fighter jets began their strikes was “real time.”

• Republican seeks investigation: Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and the chairman of the Senate panel that has oversight of the Pentagon, became the first member of his party to call for an independent review. Mr. Wicker, one of the toughest Republican critics of Mr. Hegseth, and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the committee, will request an expedited investigation by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General. But it is unclear who would oversee such an investigation: During the first week of his second term, Mr. Trump fired the inspector general at the Pentagon.

• Rubio acknowledges “mistake”: Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed during a visit to Jamaica that he was among the members of the chat group, and that “someone made a big mistake” in adding Mr. Goldberg. The official who added the journalist was Michael Waltz, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, who has said he takes “full responsibility.”

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Taken together, the statements for the most part sidestep or seek to divert attention from the fundamental fact of what happened: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used Signal, an unclassified commercial app, to share sensitive details about an imminent attack in an extraordinary breach of national security.

Here’s a look at the main players and what they’ve said about what happened, and how much their reasoning matches up with what transpired.

President Trump said the Atlantic’s article was a “witch hunt” and called the journalist a “total sleazebag.”

President Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the fervor over the Atlantic’s article was “all a witch hunt,” suggesting that perhaps Signal was faulty, and blaming former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for not having carried out the strike on Yemen during his administration.

“I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you,” he said, after complaining that “Joe Biden should have done this attack on Yemen.” The fact that he didn’t, Mr. Trump added, had “caused this world a lot of damage and a lot of problems.” While the Trump administration has criticized Mr. Biden for not being aggressive enough against the Houthis, his administration led allied nations in several attacks on Houthi sites in Yemen in 2024.

Mr. Trump has insisted that no classified information was shared among the members of the group, including the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg — and that it wasn’t uncommon for members of the government to use Signal for official business.

But he has also spent a lot more energy disparaging Mr. Goldberg and The Atlantic than defending his national security officials.

“I happen to know the guy is a total sleazebag,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Goldberg on Tuesday, speaking to reporters from the Cabinet Room. He added: “The Atlantic is a failed magazine, does very, very poorly. Nobody gives a damn about it.”

The president and the secretary of defense have the ability to assert, even retroactively, that information is declassified. Former national security officials have said they were skeptical that the information shared by Mr. Hegseth ahead of the March 15 strike was not classified, given its specificity and the life-or-death ramifications.

Mr. Hegseth said the details he shared were not technically “war plans.”

“No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information,” Mr. Hegseth wrote Wednesday on X. He added: “We will continue to do our job, while the media does what it does best: peddle hoaxes.”

In seeking to discredit The Atlantic, the White House has insisted that the information shared on Signal was not a “war plan,” as the headline on the initial story called it, but an “attack plan.” National security experts say this is very likely a distinction without a difference.

According to the messages released by The Atlantic, Mr. Hegseth included time stamps and other secret details in his messages, hours before the attack began — all of which could have upended the strikes had they fallen into the wrong hands.

Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, suggested the journalist may have been ‘sucked into’ the group chat.

On Fox News, Mr. Waltz laid into Mr. Goldberg, calling him “scum” and suggesting that he might have intentionally managed to insert his number into Mr. Waltz’s phone.

Mr. Goldberg has said he was inadvertently added to the Signal group chat by Mr. Waltz.

Mr. Waltz said that he was “not a conspiracy theorist,” but that he was suspicious about how Mr. Goldberg “somehow gets on somebody’s contact and then gets sucked into this group.”

“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there?” Mr. Waltz added, noting that “it looked like someone else.” He also said “we’re trying to figure out” whether the journalist was added to the group deliberately or through “some other technical mean.”

The host, Laura Ingraham, seemed confused by his responses, asking him if a staff member might have made such an error. Mr. Trump told NBC News on Tuesday that “it was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”

On Fox, Mr. Waltz insisted that “a staffer wasn’t responsible.”

“Look, I take full responsibility, I built the group,” he said, while also insisting he had never texted Mr. Goldberg and that he wasn’t on his phone at the time of the chat. He said that Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who is a Trump adviser, had some of “the best technical minds” looking into what might have happened.

Tulsi Gabbard, the spy chief, said she wasn’t really involved.

Ms. Gabbard told members of Congress on Wednesday that the messages proved she wasn’t involved in sharing or discussing any of the details related to the strike.

“What was shared today reflects the fact that I was not directly involved with that part of the Signal chat” she said in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.

According to the messages published in The Atlantic, Ms. Gabbard weighed in early in the exchange to name Joe Kent, who has been a top aide to Ms. Gabbard as he awaits Senate confirmation to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, as her representative to coordinate meetings. She did not text again until the end of the chat, writing “Great work and effects!” following the strike.

John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, insisted he personally did nothing wrong.

Mr. Ratcliffe defended his actions on Wednesday while expressing indignation at how The Atlantic had characterized certain information he had posted to the Signal group.

“Those messages were revealed today and revealed that I did not transmit classified information,” Mr. Ratcliffe told members of the House Intelligence Committee. He accused Mr. Goldberg of having misrepresented a detail from his contributions to the exchange.

Mr. Goldberg, he said, “indicated that I had released the name of an undercover C.I.A. operative in that Signal chat. In fact, I had released the name of my chief of staff, who is not operating undercover.”

“That was deliberately false and misleading,” Mr. Ratcliffe concluded.

In the original article, Mr. Goldberg did not refer to that person as an undercover operative, but as an “active intelligence officer.” In the second article, in which he published the Signal group’s messages, he said the C.I.A. requested that Mr. Goldberg not publish his name, so he did not. The C.I.A. likes to keep its officers’ names secret so they can still take future assignments overseas.

Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, said he didn’t have his phone on him as the plans were under discussion.

Mr. Witkoff’s only contribution to the Signal chat was one message that he sent after the strike. It was just five emojis: two prayer hands, one muscle, and two American flags.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board on Tuesday wrote that Mr. Witkoff had been in Russia at the time that plans to strike Yemen were being discussed on the Signal group.

Mr. Witkoff acknowledged that he was visiting Moscow at the time, but in a post on social media denied that he had his phone with him, saying he only had “a secure phone provided by the government for special circumstances when you travel to regions where you do not want your devices compromised.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the incident was a “big mistake” and suggested it could inspire reforms.

Mr. Rubio said it was obvious that someone had made a “big mistake” by including a journalist in the Signal group.

“Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you ain’t supposed to be on that thing,” Mr. Rubio told reporters while traveling in Jamaica.

“I think there will be reforms and changes made” as a result of the mistake, he added.

But otherwise, he echoed the argument voiced by others in the administration that because no war plans had been disclosed in the Signal group, the concerns were being overblown.

“There were no war plans on there,” Mr. Rubio told reporters. He said the chat was intended to keep Trump’s aides informed of the operations so they could talk with their counterparts in other countries about the strikes.

Edward Wong contributed reporting.

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Their answer at least left open the idea that some of the Pentagon plans shared in the chat might have been classified.

But on Wednesday there was no hint of wavering, with Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, asserting that no classified material had been put into the group chat.

“There were no sources, methods, locations or war plans that were shared,” she said.

Republicans on the committee all but ignored the issue, focusing their questions on the official subject of the hearing, the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment.

Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, who is a combat veteran and Purple Heart recipient, was one of the few Republicans on the panel to offer a defense of the chats, if partially in jest.

“I will note I always use fire emojis when I see terrorists getting killed,” he said, referring to the three emojis — a fist bump, a U.S. flag and fire — that Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, put in the chat, held on the Signal app.

Democrats, who have struggled to find their footing in the Republican-controlled federal government, appeared in lock step as they confronted one of the most notable blunders Trump administration officials have made since taking office.

In question after question, the members of the Democratic caucus hammered away at the issue of the chat group during their allotted five minutes.

Representative Chrissy Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat who is a former Air Force officer, said she had initially intended to discuss biosecurity and bioterrorism threats facing the United States.

Instead, she said that she would devote her time to pressing Mr. Trump’s national security team on the risks of communicating on a commercial messaging app.

“The threat is in the House, the threat is across the dais,” Ms. Houlahan said, pointing to Ms. Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, who is the director of the C.I.A., and the other intelligence officials who appeared at the hearing. “I need to ask these questions. It’s my job to ask these questions of you.”

She and other Democrats argued that the chats were vulnerable to interception by an adversarial power and would have endangered American pilots if the conversation had been given to the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia group that has sophisticated air-defense systems.

The intelligence report is an annual assessment by federal agencies of global threats that is presented to the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees. In past committee meetings, Republicans have sometimes focused intently on single issues that they are passionate about — like perceived flaws in the intelligence community’s work on Russia or the ouster of a Trump loyalist from a key intelligence job by the Biden administration — and Democrats have talked about the substance of the hearing topic.

But the roles were reversed this year, with Democrats relentlessly asking about the Signal chat, convinced that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had improperly shared classified information on a nonclassified platform.

The editor in chief of The Atlantic was inadvertently added to the chat group. The conversation, which The Atlantic published this week, showed that Mr. Hegseth had shared critical details of the upcoming operation, including the precise timing of attacks.

At the House hearing on Wednesday, Trump administration officials downplayed the matter.

Ms. Gabbard noted that at the time the information on the strikes was put in the chat, the same information was being provided to allies. Mr. Ratcliffe said the messages disclosed by The Atlantic made clear he had shared no classified intelligence; his contributions to the discussion indeed seemed to skirt any details revealing the agencies’ precise activities.

But Democrats rebuked that line of defense. Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas, for instance, took issue with the intelligence officials’ assertion that the information in the Signal chat on the Houthi strikes was not classified.

“You all know that’s a lie,” he said. “It’s a lie to the country.”

The hearing became contentious at many moments. An exchange between Representative Jimmy Gomez, Democrat of California, and Mr. Ratcliffe briefly devolved into a shouting match as Mr. Gomez asked witnesses whether “Pete Hegseth had been drinking before he leaked classified information.”

“I think that’s an offensive line of questioning — the answer’s no,” Mr. Ratcliffe shot back.

During his confirmation process, Mr. Hegseth made a commitment to senators that he would abstain from consuming alcohol if he were confirmed as defense secretary.

Some of the most effective questioning came from Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who is a combat veteran. Mr. Crow pointed out that the Houthis have been able to shoot down U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones, one of the weapons used in the strikes on Yemen.

With an aide holding up posters behind him, Mr. Crow described the Houthis’ advanced air-defense systems and then said it was outrageous that the administration was not accepting responsibility for the leak.

“It is a leadership failure, and that’s why Secretary Hegseth, who undoubtedly transmitted classified sensitive operational information via this chain, must resign immediately,” he said.

By the end of the hearing, more Democrats on Capitol Hill had joined in calling for Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Waltz to resign.

And though most Republicans remained in line with Mr. Trump’s response strategy to downplay and deny the seriousness of the episode, at least one Republican, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, called for an inspector general to review the incident.

Mr. Wicker, the chairman of the Senate panel with oversight authority of the Pentagon, said that he and the ranking Democratic member of the committee would request a classified briefing into the matter.

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“Obviously someone made a mistake,” Mr. Rubio said when asked by an American reporter at a news conference in Kingston, Jamaica, about the possible security failing. “Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you ain’t supposed to be on that thing.”

Mr. Rubio was speaking alongside Prime Minister Andrew Holness of Jamaica, after the two met at lunchtime during Mr. Rubio’s first stop on a tour of three nations in the Caribbean.

Mr. Rubio confirmed the substance of his part of the text messages that have been published by Mr. Goldberg. Mr. Rubio said he took part in the chat twice: once to name a point of contact for his office, his chief of staff, Michael Needham; and a second time to congratulate the team on the operation once the American military had carried out lethal strikes against the Houthi forces in Yemen.

“The Pentagon has made it clear that nothing on there would have endangered the lives or the mission,” Mr. Rubio said of the Signal chat texts. “There were no war plans on there.”

Mr. Goldberg has said the chat material included war plans, and on Wednesday The Atlantic published detailed texts of the portion of the chat that Mr. Goldberg witnessed and recorded. That included lines from Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary and former Fox News talk-show host, on weapons systems, weather conditions and the precise movements of human targets.

Mr. Rubio said in Kingston that the chat had been set up for the purposes of “coordinating” among Mr. Trump’s top foreign policy aides so they could inform their counterparts in other countries and other American officials about the strikes when the moment was right to do so.

“When these things happen, I need to call foreign ministers, especially among our close allies,” he said. “We need to notify members of Congress.”

Mr. Rubio said the information was “not intended to be divulged” to the public, and “that was a mistake and that shouldn’t have happened, and the White House is looking at it.”

He added, “I think there will be reforms and changes made.”

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The strikes in Yemen are at the center of a debacle involving Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other senior members of the Trump administration, who discussed sensitive details about the planned mission in a group chat on a messaging app before it began.

On Monday, the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote that he had been inadvertently included in the chat, the details of which could have endangered the lives of American fighter pilots.

President Trump said that he was ultimately not concerned about the leak, insisting that “there was no harm done, because the attack was unbelievably successful.”

But few details have been released.

A Central Command spokesman said this week that the strikes had “destroyed command-and-controlled facilities, air defense systems, weapons manufacturing facilities and advanced weapons storage locations.”

“While the Houthis still maintain capability, it is largely because of the nearly 10 years of support provided by Iran,” the spokesman said.

The air and naval strikes are intended to pressure the Houthis, whose attacks have disrupted international shipping lanes in the Red Sea for more than a year.

The Trump administration has not said why it thinks its campaign against the group, which has large underground weapons factories, will succeed after a yearlong effort by the Biden administration largely failed to deter the Houthi attacks.

The United States began the new offensive on March 15 in parts of northern Yemen controlled by the Houthis. Navy attack planes, off the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman in the Red Sea, and Air Force fighter jets, flying from bases in the Middle East, have conducted strikes against Houthi targets each day since.

The initial strikes were the opening salvo in what senior American officials said was a new offensive against the militants and a message to Iran as Mr. Trump seeks a nuclear deal with its government.

Mr. Trump has delegated the authority to strike targets to regional and local commanders, allowing them to attack Houthi sites more quickly and efficiently, commanders say.

Yemeni officials say the strikes have hit residential areas and buildings in the heart Sana, Yemen’s capital, resulting in an undetermined number of civilian casualties. Central Command declined to comment on reports of civilians having been killed in the strikes.

On the first day of the new offensive, Mr. Trump said on social media that the Houthis “have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones.”

Mr. Trump then pivoted to Iran’s rulers in Tehran: “To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY! Do NOT threaten the American People, their President, who has received one of the largest mandates in Presidential History, or Worldwide shipping lanes. If you do, BEWARE, because America will hold you fully accountable.”

The Biden administration, often working with the British military, conducted several strikes against the Houthis but largely failed to restore stability to the region.

U.S. officials said that airstrikes against the Houthis’ arsenal, much of which is buried deep underground, could last for several weeks, intensifying in scope and scale depending on the militants’ reaction. U.S. intelligence agencies have struggled in the past to identify and locate Houthi weapons systems, which are produced in subterranean factories and smuggled in from Iran.

Vice Admiral Kevin M. Donegan, a retired F/A-18 pilot and commander of U.S. naval forces in the Middle East, expressed support for what he said was the Trump administration’s more comprehensive approach of destroying the Houthi network that is carrying out the strikes against shipping.

“Time will tell if this network approach will re-establish the free flow of commerce, but the metric of success is a simple one: commercial ship traffic through the Red Sea resumes or the Red Sea remains closed,” Admiral Donegan said in a phone interview.

Saeed Al-Batati contributed reporting from Al Mukalla, Yemen.

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Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, took issue with the Trump administration’s semantic argument that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not disclose war plans on the Signal group chat.

“These were sensitive and detailed bits of information that if they had fallen into the hands of the Houthis would have caused them to move in offensive weapons against our pilots,” he said in a telephone interview.

Reed, along with Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and the chair of the Senate panel that has oversight of the Pentagon, has requested an expedited investigation by the Department of Defense Officer of Inspector General into the group chat.

Reed said that Hegseth’s “lax casual attitude towards critical information” could be dangerous to the lives of American fighter pilots.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that he took part in the Signal group chat among top Trump aides on airstrikes in Yemen. Speaking at a news conference during a visit to Kingston, Jamaica, he said he put two messages into the chat: one to name a point of contact for his office, and the other to congratulate the Pentagon on the success of the strikes. That confirms the messages that have been made public by Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor who was accidentally added to the chat.

Rubio said of Goldberg’s presence on the chat: “Obviously someone made a mistake. Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you aren’t supposed to be on that thing.”

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Here is what to know about how classification of information works.

Is the information in the texts classified?

The administration’s defense has rested on whether the details of the messages count as classified information. Administration officials have noted that it is up to the Defense Department to decide which details of its own work are classified. And since the head of that department, Mr. Hegseth, has declared the information not classified, it therefore is not, they have contended.

Going back to at least the Reagan administration, however, the government has considered information about “military plans, weapons or operations” to be classified.

And Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official in the first Trump administration, said the launch times posted were likely taken from a document outlining the real time battle sequence of the operation against the Houthis. “It is highly classified and protected,” Mr. Mulroy said. “Disclosure would compromise the operation and put lives at risk. Next to nuclear and covert operations, this information is the most protected.”

The administration has vigorously resisted that assessment, pointing to the Defense Department’s role in determining what material would be classified.

“There was no classified information as I understand it,” President Trump said on Tuesday.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, expanded on that defense at a House intelligence committee hearing on Wednesday, saying “no sources, methods, locations or war plans” were shared.

In the same hearing, Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas, scoffed at claims that the information wasn’t classified. “You all know that’s a lie,” he said. “It’s a lie to the country.”

How is information classified?

Each agency that handles national security secrets can deem information to be classified. Classified information falls into three basic categories: confidential, secret and top secret. Within the top secret category, there is a more restricted level of classification, called sensitive compartmented information, or S.C.I.

In the pecking order of government secrets, confidential is the lowest level and of least concern to the authorities, while S.C.I. is considered the most important and closely guarded. Typically, future military operations would be considered top secret.

The government defines top secret information as the kind of details that could cause “exceptionally grave damage to national security,” while the secret category is for information that could cause “serious” damage, and “confidential” is for the type of secret that would cause the least damage.

Across more than a dozen U.S. intelligence agencies, there are hundreds of officials who can declare information classified.

What are the penalties for mishandling classified material?

There are two ways to think about investigations into leaks of classified information: cleaning up a spill, or hunting for a leaker to punish.

The choice between those two options can determine what penalties ensue.

In so-called spillage cases, agencies are most focused on finding all the information and deleting it from computers or removing paper pages so that it cannot be shared any further.

Such cases can often result in government officials being punished, demoted or fired. They can also lose their security clearances.

In more serious cases, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department open a criminal investigation. Here, things become a little tricky because the law used to punish leakers, the Espionage Act of 1917, was written long before the current system of classification was created after World War II.

Let’s take a recent example.

In 2023, a former F.B.I. analyst, Kendra Kingsbury, was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for stashing 386 classified documents at her home. Some of the documents contained highly sensitive national defense information.

At her sentencing, officials said the case raised troubling questions. Prosecutors said Ms. Kingsbury’s telephone records showed that she had called phone numbers linked to subjects of counterterrorism investigations, and that those people had also contacted Ms. Kingsbury. Investigators say they were unable to determine what was said on those calls.

Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.

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Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, says that she just briefed the president on the messages in the Signal thread, which The Atlantic released this morning. She says Trump has “great trust” in his national security team.

Leavitt, speaking at a White House news briefing, continues to insist that even the more detailed information revealed in the Signal chat was not classified information, as determined by the secretary of defense himself. She says she would characterize it as a “sensitive policy discussion.”

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A full “war plan” would undoubtedly be more specific, with the routings of weaponry and coordinates for targets. But that is not likely to help the defense secretary as he tries to explain away why he put these details on an unclassified commercial app that, while encrypted, was far from the heavily protected, classified internal systems used by the Pentagon.

The publication of the timeline on Wednesday morning — which the administration all but encouraged by declaring so vociferously that none of the information on the chat was classified — only accelerated the calls by Democrats for Mr. Hegseth to resign.

The time stamps he included in his messages, hours before the attack began, were critical: Had this information leaked out, the Houthi fighters and missile experts the United States was targeting in Yemen might have had time to escape, and American pilots and other service members could have been put at risk. Mr. Hegseth’s own references in the Signal chain to “OPSEC” — or operational security — indicated he fully understood the need to keep this timing secret.

And the level of detail was striking: “1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package),” Mr. Hegseth wrote in the chat. “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME) — also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s).”

Clearly this is the most sensitive of battlefield plans, which adversaries could use to avoid being hit, or to ready themselves to attack American forces. “It’s by the awesome grace of God that we are not mourning dead pilots right now,” Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, said at a hearing Wednesday morning with top intelligence officials, some of whom were part of the Signal chat.

National security veterans say it is almost farcical to argue that this was not classified data, at least when Mr. Hegseth sent details of the plan to the group chat. It was so sensitive that in most administrations it would even be kept off most classified systems. The debate that played out over Signal would typically be confined to the Situation Room, with just a few officials dialing in from secure locations, over specially protected, government-owned lines.

Yet the question of classification has been at the heart of the Trump administration’s explanations for why the Signal chat was a minor transgression.

“So this was not classified,” President Trump insisted during a meeting with U.S. ambassadors at the White House on Tuesday. “Now if it’s classified information, it’s probably a little bit different, but I always say, you have to learn from every experience.”

(His tone, and perhaps his view, had changed by Wednesday. Asked by reporters if he still believed there had been no sharing of classified information, Mr. Trump said, “That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know. I’m not sure — you have to ask the various people involved.”)

The White House and national security officials will not say whether the timing data was ever declassified, who made that determination or, crucially, whether they did so after the attack was over — and after The Atlantic’s revelations were published.

Mr. Hegseth, in another encounter with reporters traveling with him to Asia, avoided any questions on Wednesday, especially the key one: Why did he put the strike data on a commercial app whose servers are outside the United States? Instead, he blamed the Biden administration for not striking the Houthis harder and said “nobody’s texting war plans.”

“There’s no units, no location, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information.” He omitted the obvious: The timing and targets were included.

But clearly the White House had decided that if the facts wouldn’t win the day, semantic gymnastics might. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, made the case that Mr. Hegseth, a former National Guard infantryman and television commentator who has made a series of missteps in his first two months in office, did nothing wrong. And she sought to impugn The Atlantic, which had initially not published the specific information about the attacks out of concern that they could be classified and have national security implications, and only did so after the administration repeatedly insisted that the material was not classified and disputed Mr. Goldberg’s characterization of the contents of the text chain.

“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,’” Ms. Leavitt wrote on X after The Atlantic used the phrase “attack plans” to describe them. “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

Leaving aside her attacks on Mr. Goldberg, who has covered national security affairs for several decades, Ms. Leavitt’s blast was openly contradicted by the director of the C.I.A., John Ratcliffe, in testimony in front of a Senate committee on Tuesday.

He acknowledged that the Signal chain, in which he was a participant, was real, and Mr. Goldberg’s description of it was accurate. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who at first tried to evade questions about the Signal chain, later agreed, once Mr. Ratcliffe confirmed his participation.

Both said the information was not classified. But when pressed, they amended their comments to say there was no classified intelligence information in the chat — meaning they were not commenting on whether there were classified Pentagon operational plans.

But to truth-test their comments, consider this one, common-sense question: Had a news organization gone to the Pentagon or the National Security Council before the attack, and said it was considering publishing this kind of timing and detail, would the administration have asked it to withhold the information because it could have compromised the attack? Or because it could have put American pilots at risk if the Houthis, with their missile capabilities, knew they were coming?

The administration almost certainly would have asked them not to publish — and most responsible news organizations would have held that data back, at least until the attack was over. It is a scenario that has played out many times in the past few years, involving everything from operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to attacks on Syrian and Iranian sites.

All of which makes it all the more mystifying that more than 18 Trump administration officials discussed that timing on a commercial if encrypted app, one they normally use to bounce around ideas, or discuss sensitive but unclassified ideas. Or that they seem to have no sense of irony that, less than a decade ago, they were outraged that a Democratic former secretary of state running for president had put far less important data on a computer server in her home.

Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and the chair of the Senate panel that has oversight of the Pentagon, says that he and his Democratic counterpart will request an expedited investigation by the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General into the Signal group chat. Wicker and Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island and the top Democrat on the committee, are also seeking to hold classified briefings on the matter.

This is the first call from a Republican for independent review of the group chat. Most have said an investigation conducted by the White House is sufficient. It is unclear who would oversee such an investigation. During the first week of his second term, President Trump fired the inspector general at the Pentagon.

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