Lawfare Daily: Attack Plans Shared on Signal Released by The Atlantic

[Intro]

Shane Harris: One, when the CIA director talks about assets, mobilizing assets, you can presume he's talking about human assets, which we also call spies. He could be talking as well about technical means of collection, but both of these things implicate sources and methods of intelligence gathering.

Benjamin Wittes: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare with Shane Harris of the Atlantic.

Shane Harris: We've all used group threads, I mean, so either Michael Waltz or somebody who was physically handling his phone added Jeff to the group. I mean, that is, it's plain as the nose on your face.

Benjamin Wittes: In a live recording on March 26, we discussed the Atlantic's decision to release the text messages sent by Trump administration officials in the “Houthis PC small group” Signal chat, which accidentally included the Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeff Goldberg. We talked about the testimony given today on the subject and what accountability may look like.

[Main podcast]

Let's start, just bring us up to speed. As of yesterday, we had Jeffrey Goldberg story in which you were kind of named eminence grise but were not on the byline. And then early this morning, you guys released the texts of the “Houthi PC small group” Signal group.

So walk us through your decision to do that. Why was stuff that was too sensitive to release yesterday appropriate for publication today?

Shane Harris: Well, and thanks for having me. So on Monday when we launched our first story, you know, we showed some screenshots of the text, we quoted from some texts, and then we, as you say left out things that were more sensitive, that we deemed were sensitive. And I should say like we deemed—I mean like I thought common sense indicated they were sensitive and were not the kind of things that would ordinarily be, you know, made public by government officials.

So, we describe that information. And then, you know, two very curious things happen. One was that across the government, throughout the day, officials, including the White House press secretary, the CIA director, the DNI, and ultimately the president himself said that nothing in the Signal chat was classified. It was all unclassified, they said.

And the second thing that happened was many of these same officials, including the president insisted that we were somehow trying to deceive the public with our description of what was in these texts, that we were effectively lying to people. And, you know—and I think you captured this Ben yesterday in a piece that you wrote—when you have the entire national security establishment saying there is nothing classified in these texts, okay, well then there, there should be no problem releasing them. And then we also felt that, you know, we, we felt that our own credibility was being questioned and I think wanted to defend that.

And we can talk, talk through more if you want, about in the weeds of deciding to do this, but those were the, the two reasons that we decided that we, we were leaning towards yesterday publishing them in their entirety, which we did today with one very small redaction.

Benjamin Wittes: Right. And let's talk about that redaction, which—so even here on day two, you guys are being more cautious than the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States, including the CIA director. So describe the, the narrow point on which you are still holding out on us.

Shane Harris: Right. I. So the CIA director John Ratcliffe in the thread when Mike Waltz asks the group to essentially nominate someone who's their point of conduct from their agency, John Ratcliffe offers the name of the individual who is serving as his chief of staff currently, and he prints that person's full name. And there are other officials who sound off and give their names too.

We did not print that in the first instance because we had reason to believe that that person was—and we confirmed this—is an active intelligence officer. There was some question in our mind of whether this person was undercover, but we knew her to be an active intelligence officer, so we didn't put that in there. That's the kind of thing that we often don't include.

And then Director Ratcliffe, I would note, came out yesterday, said there was nothing wrong with putting this name in here in the thread; that it was not a secret, this person's not undercover. And yet if you read our story, you will see that we at the CIA's request still did not publish that name. So the director, just to be clear, is saying publicly, this person's not undercover. Good. Glad we've established that. There was nothing wrong with him putting the name in the chat. Got that. But still doesn't want us to print it.

And we're respecting that because this individual has a career of her own. She didn't say anything in the chat at all. And that says the one narrow exception that we're making because we think that's the appropriate thing to do. And when we asked the CIA, do you object to any information being published, this was one of their requests, was their request not to publish that in the piece.

Benjamin Wittes: So that's super interesting. I'm gonna give my impression of this question 'cause it came up in an earlier conversation today. Tell me if your impression is different. My impression is that the name of a CIA officer can never really be classified because there's a birth certificate, there's a, you know, high school graduation record that's gonna be in the person's orig, real name; what is classified is that that person by that name is employed by the CIA. Is that your impression as well, or do I have it mixed up?

Shane Harris: I don't know whether or not their employment is classified. But if somebody is undercover, their identity is, you know, is protected. They might use a pseudonym when they're serving overseas. And the director was, was very clear that this person is not undercover, you know, and he did say, you know, she is known to people in the administration. She acts in a liaison capacity. The people who work around her know who she is.

Benjamin Wittes: Right, and just to be clear, there is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with her showing up and her referring, his referring to her by her actual name in the Situation Room, right, or in the agency itself, or in the context of high side business? The question is, in a Signal chat with Jeff Goldberg, is it appropriate to refer to her by her regular name?

Shane Harris: That's right. That's right. And you know, and just again, to emphasize it was the CIA's request that we continue to withhold her name and we agreed to do that.

Benjamin Wittes: Note here how the CIA is overriding the testimony of the CIA director. He says, nothing, nothing sensitive here, folks, nothing classified. CIA, in conversation with the Atlantic: yeah, I know he says that, but please don't publish that name.

Alright, so let's talk about, a little bit about today's hearing, which I only heard part of, but the dynamic duo of Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe were back on the Hill today, this time in front of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and both, again, taking the view that none of this stuff is classified and Ratcliffe at one point is outraged that Democrats want to talk about this instead of real threats to America like illegal immigration and cartels.

So describe for us—without getting into a debate with the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA director—describe for us what information was actually in this. So what, what is the difference between the state of the public record today versus yesterday?

Shane Harris: The big thing that is included today that was not spelled out in detail in our story on Monday is a portion of a text that is shared by the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, that begins team update. And he goes on to give weather conditions, say that they're go for mission launch, the kinds of planes and weapons that will be used in the attack, and the times they'll be over their targets.

Specificity like that, you know—this I think is like, you know what people are, are debating our term war plan, and Pete Hegseth has been saying, nobody shared any war plans. Pick whatever name you want for it. It is a detailed list of the force that will be being applied by the U.S. military to kill people, like do you wanna call it that? Does that work for us?

He's sharing it in this room. It seems pretty clear; it looks like he's getting it, he's copying and pasting it from some other location potentially. But that was one of the big things that's in there.

Notably when the DNI and the CIA director were challenged on some of this— and I think really more maybe to the DNI's point actually—by members who were saying, look according to the public regulations, information of this kind is presumptively classified, at least at the secret level and, and under other regulations, the top secret.

And her answer was essentially, well, that's up to the secretary of defense. He is the one that shared it. I didn't. There's a lot of passing the buck and the hot potato going on right now and pointing the fingers. And you can see people pointing the fingers at Mike Waltz for setting up the room in the first place, and then Pete Hegseth. I, I think so that was one piece.

Benjamin Wittes: So wait, can I, can I, because I'm actually at least a little bit sympathetic to Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe on this point. That it seems to me, there's nothing in principle wrong with having a Signal group, that as long as you're not sharing classified material on it, but it's approved for certain coordination and other non-high side purposes.

And so you set up a, maybe you should call it something that's a little bit less revealing than Houthi PC small group. And so you could say, if you're Tulsi Gabbard and you want it to be completely straightforward about it, you could say, look, there's a problem here, but it's not my problem.

Shane Harris: Right.

Benjamin Wittes: The national security advisor wanted a coordination mechanism that we could all use offline, so okay he sets up a Signal group. There's nothing wrong with that. I didn't add the Atlantic to it; he did that. And I didn't share any classified material on it—in fact, I'm not even the classifying authority for that material. That, that's, you gotta ask Hegseth about that. But to do that throws two other people over the side of the bus.

If she'd said that, is there a problem with that as an explanation? Hey, I didn't invite, I didn't invite Jeff Goldberg and I didn't share any classified information. You're asking the wrong girl here.

Shane Harris: Yeah, there. I don't know that there would be, because I mean that's, that's a defensible point. There are different regs that govern intelligence vs. DOD information. And she was, and she has given, by the way, multiple different answers about what was shared, unclassified or no intelligence information that was classified. I mean, she's been sort of, you know, having trouble getting one explanation.

There's a separate issue though for Director Gabbard in particular, which is that regarding this very passage of information that we're talking about, she was asked yesterday—because we refer to, we characterize the information, in our first story, we described it—she was asked directly by senators, did you ever see any information about weapon systems, you know, types of weapons, etc.? And she said, well, not that I can recall.

And so she was pressed today by people saying, is it still your testimony that in the two weeks since you were in this room and this message was shared, that you simply don't remember? You saw that part of the message. And I thought she had some real challenges, let's say, answering that direction.

Benjamin Wittes: She did, although that surprised me a little bit because I was, I would've thought the time difference was, you know, would've been, you know, she was on some kind of Asia-Pacific swing at the time, and I would've thought her answer to that could have very reasonably been, I actually didn't see that stuff in real time.

But, alright, so do we agree that the big problem here—I mean there's three groups with big problems. There's Waltz who created the group, added Jeff to it. There's Hegseth who shared the information; we'll get to him last 'cause I think he has the biggest problem. And then there's the two who just happened to be unlucky enough to have to testify about it the last two days, who I think actually have the least exposure.

Shane Harris: That's true.

Benjamin Wittes: In the sense that it's really embarrassing for them, but they didn't really do very much.

Shane Harris: I mean, Tulsi Gabbard barely speaks and, and Ratcliffe doesn't talk very much, although I'd love to talk about the one thing that he does say that I think is an issue, but

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, so let's finish dealing with Tulsi and Ratcliffe and then go on to the others. So what did Ratcliffe say that you wanted to mention?

Shane Harris: There's a portion in the chat where officials are talking about whether or not they should do the attack imminently or whether they should delay by a month or so, and, and what benefit might come from delaying, you know, more policy discussion. The vice president seems to be indicating that like maybe we need to kind of tap the brakes on this and think a bit more about it.

And the director of CIA John Radcliffe says, quoting here, from CIA perspective, we are mobilizing assets to support now, as in the attack, but a delay would not negatively impact us, and additional time would be used to identify better starting points for coverage on Houthi leadership.

Okay. That is talking about a number of things. One, when the CIA director talks about assets, mobilizing assets, you can presume he's talking about human assets, which we also call spies.

Benjamin Wittes: Right.

Shane Harris: He could be talking as well about technical means of collection, but both of these things implicate sources and methods of intelligence gathering. Now he's doing it in—I'm not, yeah, I'm not alleging that he is saying we're going to contact the agent inside the Houthis whose code name is X, but he is speaking about assets and mobilizing and if we had more time, here are the other things we could do, like do coverage on Houthi leadership, which, and, and identify better starting points, which by the way would indicate that they maybe don't have the, kind of the best starting points that they would like.

There's a lot contained in that one paragraph. And John Ratcliffe has been, and others have been trying to say, there's no sources and methods information. That’s sources and methods information.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah. It's not even, I mean, it's worse than that. They're saying there's no intelligence equities at all in the classified space. I think—

Shane Harris: It is.

Benjamin Wittes: I think merely the fact that the CIA director says, hey, we'd be better positioned in a month—

Shane Harris: Correct.

Benjamin Wittes: There's just no way that fact isn't I, again, whether it's classified is really up to him, but it's obviously sensitive.

Shane Harris: Yes, it is. And, and I think that a lot of, you know, there's, there, there are two kinds of counterarguments that the administration is pushing. One is this isn't classified, which is a quite technical argument that some are making, and some of these same people are also, I think, essentially kind of making an argument of this is not a big deal, oh, what's the problem? I mean, Vice President Vance said something similar where he said, oh, the Atlantic is oversold what was in here. This is like making it out to be like it's a nothing burger. It is not a nothing burger, right?

I mean, John Ratcliffe would never be speaking these words out in public because they are revealing of what the CIA is doing against the Houthis. And maybe he didn't, you know, elaborate beyond that. But the idea that this is somehow a shrug and not that sensitive—I, I'm sorry. It's just that it's plainly not true and it doesn't even pass the smell test.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so let's then go to where I think the most sensitive material is, which is not in the intelligence space, but in the military space and it's in the material that Pete Hegseth releases about what's going on right now or in the imminent future, and by imminent, I mean in the next two hours, right?

So this again, is material totally appropriate to share with everybody in that group, save the one who's there by accident. But do you agree with me that if a private first class or some computer technician—let's call him Sedward Sowden —had given this material to a journalist—let's call him Senn Seenwald—and let's say Senn Seenwald had published it in real time, given to him by, you know, said Sedward Sowden, do you have any doubt that the government would A, consider it classified, and B, consider it a prosecutorial priority to put the leaker in prison?

Shane Harris: I, I have zero doubt about that, and not only do I have no doubt that they would prosecute him, even if the information were somehow deemed unclassified, the fact that this person was transmitting it to a journalist would probably trigger the Espionage Act because it is clearly national defense information and the Espionage Act. There's no way that a private or some low level person does this and does not get punished.

Benjamin Wittes: So I, I, I guess here is where I’m hung up. Like they seem to be trying to make this technical argument that it's not classified. This kind of information is per se, classified, right? It's real time. It's not very specific targeting information, but it is specific enough that if you were the Houthis and you got it, you would know to get your leadership down below ground,

Shane Harris: Precisely. You would as one, as one member of Congress a little bit ago, asked at the House hearing, you know, wouldn't, if you were the Houthis and you had this, wouldn't, you know, to duck, right?

And I would even, even maybe go a step further than that, which is to say, if you know the time at which these aircraft are gonna be over you, and, and you know—and by the way the administration is trying to claim, there's no targeting information in here or location information, they literally refer to the house of a girlfriend of the head of the Houthis missile production line. I mean, that's pretty specific, but my point is that if you had information like this in advance, you knew the platforms that were coming, you could potentially figure out which way they're coming from—they have anti-aircraft capability, the Houthis —that directly puts U.S. forces in harm's way because you know what to look for and when it's coming and you might try to shoot them down.

So again, I mean, getting hung up on this question of is it classified, unclassified, kind of like misses to some degree, the severity of the information, whatever you wanna call it. It is highly sensitive and it's revealing, and if it fell into the hands of our adversaries, it would help them, right. The, the question about whether it's classified or not is not trivial.

And it has legal implications. I think that Pete Hegseth is going to have to answer the question, when you put this in the chat, did you declassify it? Did you know it to be unclassified when you did? He hasn't really answered these questions yet. I mean, he hadn't, didn't have the privilege of finding himself in the hot seat at two congressional hearings. He's on—

Benjamin Wittes: Lucky dog.

Shane Harris: Yeah, he is, lucky him. He picked a great time to be out of town. I mean, I'm not being facetious about that. He's on a trip in Asia right now.

But you know, to the extent that Ratcliffe and Gabbard are pointing at Hegseth and saying, look, that information about the planes and the weapons, et cetera, that's DOD information, that's the secretary's prerogative, then the question to him was, okay, did you know it to be unclassified or did you declassify it when you shared it. And he does have the authority by the way, to do that; he can declassify. The question is, did he, and I mean, and I now, I fear we're gonna be back in the land of like we were with the Mar-a-Lago documents being like, well, did he just sort of imagine it unclassified?

Benjamin Wittes: Well, so I dunno, but I don't think he gets that defense. So the, the, the president is the president, if he makes something public, it is by that, by the fact of that act, it is, he is, he is declassifying it now. Query whether any of that is true of an ex-president or if you simply steal it when you become the ex-president, that's the Mar-a-Lago case.

The Secretary of Defense is an original classifying authority under the executive order, but he is, he doesn't get to declassify somebody something by releasing it. There is still, you know, he still has to make an affirmative decision to declassify it. And so I think the question as a technical matter would turn on how the information came to him.

That is, you know, was he briefed on this targeting package in some—usually the Pentagon works in, in slide decks, as you know, not in documents—so there's some PowerPoint presentation or something where somebody presented the targeting package to him, and I would be stunned if it doesn't have the words classification, you know, top secret, no foreign on every page of the top of it.

Shane Harris: Right.

Benjamin Wittes:  If he just lifted text out of there and dropped it into a Signal thread, I think he's got a problem.

Shane Harris: I think he does too. Particularly if he did it on a phone that was a personal phone, I mean it's, you know. There's another kind of weird wrinkle into this, is that everybody in that chat room with the exception of Jeff Goldberg was authorized to see classified information.

Benjamin Wittes: Right.

Shane Harris: He didn't have to unclassify anything. So the idea that if he's now gonna argue, well, it was unclassified, well, why would you feel the need to share only unclassified information in a principal's committee meeting?

Now, if you were to say like, well, I knew because it was on Signal, and you can share unclassified information on Signal, okay, maybe then very why you're even using Signal. But it's a very interesting how these officials keep rushing to, you know, the explanation that it's unclassified. It's unclassified, there's nothing wrong with it, why are you limiting yourself to sharing only unclassified information in a principals committee meeting about an active military operation?

Benjamin Wittes: Right, right.

Shane Harris: That doesn't make any sense. They didn't know the journalist was in the room.

Benjamin Wittes: So the hard case would be if you had, somehow the information comes to him with no classification markings on it. And I'm not sure why that would happen. Sometimes it can be 'cause it's on the high side and you know, you don't, maybe not need to mark it because it's on the high side, right., but usually the markings are there, at least in my limited understanding.

So somehow I think if you were investigating this, you would really wanna see the package that that text was drawn from. Or was it oral and he just kind of typed it down? But was he in a SCIF when he did it? What's the, what, what's the mode by which this information comes to him is I think the question that the classification issue will turn on.

Shane Harris: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: I wanna turn to Mike Waltz.

Shane Harris: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Mike Waltz is A, the person who invited Jeff into the room in the first place, and he has been, I think, most malicious in characterizing the Atlantic's behavior. That is, he's implied last night that Jeff sort of hacked his way in. So I wanna ask, is Jeff Goldberg a master hacker? Has he actually figured out how to penetrate Signal?

Shane Harris: I, I gotta say, Jeff Goldberg has many wonderful qualities. I've spent a lot of time with Jeff around computers the past several days, and no, Jeff is not a master hacker.

Benjamin Wittes: He's not, alright. So if you know the FSB or the SVR or you know, the Chinese have penetrated Signal, Jeff hasn't figured out how to break Signal and get into all the chat rooms that he wants.

Shane Harris: He, he has not, I don't think Jeff would mind me even teasing him that, you know, thumb drives are a little bit confusing, so, no, no, he is not doing that.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, next question. Does the Atlantic have a skunk works like facility, you know, there, where like you guys have a team of master hackers working for Jeff, sort of like, you know, the NSA TAO group, you know, that's you know, getting him into Signal groups.

Shane Harris: I will say this is a very futuristic looking office and there's like some kind of weird AI that controls the blinds, but I am not aware that we have like a tailored access operations unit like, you know, in a secret panel behind the refrigerator or something like that.

Benjamin Wittes: Right.

Shane Harris: I, I'm pretty sure we don't.

Benjamin Wittes: Okay, 'cause I'm just checking 'cause you know, this is the National Security Advisor of the United States who made this allegation. We gotta run down the components of it. So as best as you can tell, is it fair to say that Mike Waltz on national television was just lying about Jeff yesterday?

Shane Harris: Well, I don't know why he thinks that he is some kind of master hacker or why he thinks he would possess the skill to get into his—why Jeff would be able to get into his phone. So I can't say that Mike Waltz is lying, maybe he's a little bit confused.

But I just wanna point one thing out, because Mike Waltz has said that they're gonna get to the bottom of how Jeff was added to this group. And I think at one point he used the phrase that maybe somehow his number was sucked into my phone, from where I'm not really sure. But there's a very salient piece of information that I would direct readers to and the national security advisor to, which is at the top of the chain, which we published, it says the following, Michael Waltz added you to the group.

Benjamin Wittes: Right.

Shane Harris: We've all used group threads. I mean, so either Michael Waltz or somebody who was physically handling his phone added Jeff to the group. I mean, that is, it's plain as the nose on your face.

Benjamin Wittes: And is your working assumption that there is some other Jeff Goldberg who was supposed to be a member of the group, or do we just not have a working theory for how this happened?

Shane Harris: We don't know. I mean, I have seen people float theories, you know, on social media that, you know, there are other officials in the government with the initials J.G., could be. People have noted it, sometimes people will change their initials or only use one initial in a signal group for some added level of anonymity. Is it possible that, you know, when Waltz or whoever was handling the phone and populating the list, you know, maybe they, their, their thumb hit Jeff's name and they didn't mean to? We just don't know.

But what I find, you know, frankly, you know, concerning is that the person who does know or who knows, the people who know how it happened, is Mike Waltz, and he is, is acting as if there is some kind of, you know, covert operation of which he has been the victim and they're going to get to the bottom of that. And, and I just, I, I think that's, that is bewildering to me. It’s—

Benjamin Wittes: I mean, well, it's not bewildering.

Shane Harris: It's well, I, I wanna say, I think he's being disingenuous.

Benjamin Wittes: You're being, you're being too generous. Yeah. He is the national security advisor to the president. There being a very clear record of what happened, which is that somehow he inadvertently invited Jeff in, is trying to divert attention from that by making unfounded and completely implausible allegations and saying it is under investigation, rather than by announcing candidly and publicly what he did and how he made it happen. And there, I'm sure there's a innocent-ish investigation. He wasn't trying to leak stuff to Jeff Goldberg, I'm sure, but he did, I think the technical term is screw up.

Shane Harris: Yes.

Benjamin Wittes: And he should be candid about it.

Shane Harris: And I, and also the person who agrees with you on that is Donald Trump who said in a meeting yesterday—the press was there, I think it was in the Roosevelt room with Mike Waltz at the head of the table and a lot of other officials—Trump said, you know, he's a good man. He said in other interviews, he's a good man who made a mistake. So the president has said Mike Waltz made a mistake. Mike Waltz has not said that he made a mistake. He's somehow implying that Jeff Goldberg had something to do with this.

Benjamin Wittes: Right.

All right, so let's talk about the investigative mechanism, because ironically, the investigative mechanism is supposedly coming from Mike Waltz. It's supposed to be investigated in the National Security Council

Shane Harris: Right.

Benjamin Wittes: Which is not an investigative entity. Normally when you have a security breach, you know, you have an internal investigation in the agency and/or the FBI does an investigation and it certainly does if it reaches a criminal question.

So I’m curious what you understand about the investigative mechanism here 'cause I don't understand anything about it, including who's doing it.

Shane Harris: Right. So exactly, so NSC and Trump even said, you know, oh, we're gonna get to the bottom of it. But then Trump somehow suggested that they kind of know what happened? I mean, he was characteristically all over the map with this when you spoke yesterday.

So NSC is supposed to be looking into it. Tulsi Gabbard, you know, on a number of occasions, tried to use that fact as a way of not answering questions about what happened.

My understanding is that there seems to be some support building in the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Senator Wicker, I believe, and the, the, the ranking member would be Senator Reed.

Benjamin Wittes: Reed.

Shane Harris:—to do an and to ask for or to demand an inspector general investigation. Now that would be, I think, totally appropriate. You would expect something like that for the IG to look into it. I'm guessing it would be DOD IG given their proof

Benjamin Wittes: So that, but that would be weird.

Shane Harris: But then how do they investigate presidential communications?

Benjamin Wittes: So, yeah, so the, the problem with a DOD IG investigation is, it's fine for Hegseth purposes.

Shane Harris: Yes.

Benjamin Wittes: But it's not fine for NSC purposes or IC purposes.

Shane Harris: Right, that’s right.

Benjamin Wittes: You could have a joint investigation, but then between the IC inspector general, the CIA inspector general, and the Defense Department inspector general, I think some of those have been fired by the way. So that would make it a little tricky. But even if you could do that, it still wouldn't answer the Waltz Stephen Miller question.

Shane Harris: Cause there really isn't an IG for the president or for the executive office of the president.

Benjamin Wittes: Correct.

Shane Harris: So the, the other avenue here and the one that is usually what happens when there is a spillage or a leak of classified information or sensitive information or national defense information is the FBI would investigate it.

And you know, sitting alongside Director Gabbard and Director Ratcliffe at these hearings the past two days has been FBI Director Kash Patel, perhaps very glad that he's not being asked so many questions and clearly being, I'm sure very glad he was not on the Signal chain. He has said that he was briefed on it. He was asked about it by, in a number of in both hearings, I believe, and has no update or information on whether the FBI is investigating this.

I mean, at some point I suspect he's going to have to answer the question, are you or are you not investigating it, and why? That's the place where you would expect this to go in any normal circumstance. Which is not to say that anyone's going to be criminally prosecuted here, but if you're trying to figure out how it happened and you wanna have a credible investigation, that's usually the route that you would go. The idea that the NSC, which is run by the very guy who set up the signal thread is going to do a credible investigation, that's just silly.

Benjamin Wittes: Yeah, I mean I, I, as I told you when you were reporting this story, I don't think a criminal case is plausible here.

Shane Harris:  Yeah, I don't think so.

Benjamin Wittes: Because the disclosure is accidental and they basically never prosecute accidental disclosures.

Shane Harris: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: Unless there's some wildly aggravating factor.

Now there's a complication here that I think could make that interesting, which is that both the director of National Intelligence and the CIA director proceeded to testify about the matter, and let's just say their, their testimony hasn't aged well in the 24 hours since they gave it. But I don't think realistically, you're likely to make a perjury or false statements case either because there's enough wiggle room about what precisely they were trying to convey.

Shane Harris: Right.

Benjamin Wittes: That said, it has to be investigated.

Shane Harris: Yes. And for them not to investigate it, I think, that would be the first really strong signal that we would've received, that the FBI and the Trump administration is not going to investigate wrongdoing by government officials or by their friends. That they're just going to ignore it because, you know, it, it could potentially be embarrassing for them.

But to be clear, that is not how things are normally done. And, you know, and I don't like the, you know, the, if the shoe were on the other foot comparisons, but it is useful. You know, if Jake Sullivan had, did this, done this—first of all, I think he probably would've resigned, and I think that the President Biden probably would've accepted his resignation—there's no question in my mind that Chris Wray would've investigated this, and President Biden would've said, absolutely, you need to investigate.

Benjamin Wittes: Okay, so you don't need to speculate, because in fact, Jake Sullivan did something roughly in, not in this ballpark, but at a much lower level of magnitude, which was that he was one of the people who was exchanging emails with classified information with Hillary Clinton on her server.

We know that Jake Sullivan was involved in a security, an accidental security breach involving, like this, high level officials who were authorized to receive the information, but it was done by less than optimally secure means. Didn't end up in the hands of Jeffrey Goldberg, who was not accidentally CC'd on any of them, but okay, and it was investigated by the FBI. So we actually, you don't have to speculate about the shoe on the other foot situation. It's a different shoe. It fits differently. It's actually much less bad, but it was on the other foot.

Shane Harris: Yeah.

Benjamin Wittes: And we know exactly how the FBI handled it, which is much to Hillary Clinton's annoyance, they investigated it.

Shane Harris: Right. And when the Justice Department decided not to prosecute—ultimately we know this from, you know, follow up reports, including the Horowitz IG report—they did look at the Espionage Act and they looked at this question of gross negligence under the Espionage Act, which would seem to be, you know, theoretically might be applicable in the case of the Signal group, and there to—and this is why I think I agree with you that there, that no one's gonna get criminally charged here—the question of what is gross negligence, it turns out, is really gray and it's fuzzy and it's not well understood.

There's not great case history for it. The DOJ actually had to go back to the original debate of the Espionage Act, which was passed in 1917 to try and understand what the lawmakers at the time meant by gross negligence, and, and ultimately they decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.

I think that if there were an investigation of this, I, I, I would bet that they'd probably come to the same conclusion. Now, I mean, of course this is a very politically different Justice Department, but if you're just looking at the facts and what happened, you know—and we know quite a lot about what happened because of these texts falling into Jeff's hands—then, then no, I don't think that they would find a criminal case here.

Benjamin Wittes: I have very little doubt—and I wanna say this, you can hold me to this—if and when there's an investigation and it declines prosecution and a lot of Democrats are upset, I, I think eventually that's likely to happen, count me with Pam Bondi on the declination.

Here's where I think you get into really dangerous territory, though. There needs to be an investigation, right? I'm fine with the outcome of it being, we've never prosecuted a case like this. We won't, but there needs to be a, an investigation that finds down to as close as you can to forensic certitude, what happened, who was involved, what was the degree of spillage?

Because you know, realistically something gets to Jeff Goldberg. You wanna verify that he didn't share it with anybody other than Shane Harris. We know he shared it with Shane Harris, right? You wanna figure out what the, you wanna have a little bit of a damage assessment. And then you wanna look at the sworn testimony of the officials in question.

All of that stuff has to be looked at, and I'm fine with the answer, you know, okay, they should all lose their jobs, but they shouldn't be prosecuted. But you can't not do the investigation, and that seems to me to be, you know, as much as she was, she bitterly resented it, it was the right answer with the Hillary Clinton investigation; tt's the right answer here too.

Shane Harris: Yeah. And another reason for the investigation is to find out are there other Signal groups or other groups like this, or is this a one-off?

Benjamin Wittes: And to deter, since we kind of intuitively know the answer to that question—and actually Tulsi Gabbard was kind of asked that and conspicuously didn't say no, today—that we know that there are, it would be, it would defy logic for this to have been the only Signal group, you know, that was ever created involving high ranking officials swapping classified material would happen to have included Jeff Goldberg.

It's probably a practice that is pretty normal since nobody responded to being invited to this, excuse me, why the heck are you putting me on a Signal group? Shouldn't we this be on the high side?

Shane Harris: Right.

Benjamin Wittes: No one's doing that. So, you know, there's some deterrent value in people knowing that this is a matter that gets investigated.

Shane Harris: Yeah, agreed.

Benjamin Wittes: Alright, so before I let you go, where does the story go from here? Now that you've put it all out there, are you done?

Shane Harris: Well, I think now we, we wanna know what there are other Signal groups, so if anyone listening is aware of a Signal group, you can find my secure contact information on Signal at the Atlantic website. I think we wanna know that.

I think we are trying to understand now too what actions Congress might take. Will there be an investigation? And look, and there is a political story about this that has Washington frothing right now, which is, you know, is anybody, is any head gonna roll here? Is Mike Waltz gonna get fired? Will he resign? Will someone near him resign?

And what about Pete Hegseth? I mean, he's going to be coming home to lots and lots of questions about his role in this. I mean, he's not traveling with a huge press contingent right now; he's off doing this foreign trip. So I think that that political story is probably gonna dominate as well.

But look, there's also, you know—and I've written about this, and you and I have talked about this too—this is, I think, part of a pattern. The extremely lax and careless approach that this administration has taken to security, to counterintelligence concerns. I wrote a lot recently about all the different security and counterintelligence risks that the DOGE people are creating when they barge into agencies and start knocking around and computers with no regard for the data they're handling.

This is, I mean, what we're seeing here is this amazing kind of like laser view of one set of activities around the Houthis strike, but it's part of a broader pattern of carelessness and recklessness. And frankly, going back to the first Trump administration where the president was, you know, serially, you know, abusive of intelligence that we got from allies, you know, U.S. intelligence equities, and then ultimately of course was criminally charged for mishandling classified information.

So, I mean, to me, this is kind of a, this is the latest chapter in a story that kind of keeps on going, and then we will keep following.

Benjamin Wittes: I'll let you go, but I have one last question.

Shane Harris: Yes.

Benjamin Wittes: Have you or Jeff gotten any additional mysterious Signal invites since this story broke?

Shane Harris: If, if we do, you might read about it in the Atlantic.

Benjamin Wittes: We will talk to you soon. Thanks for joining us.

Shane Harris: Thanks, Ben.

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