What does the continuing fallout from the Signal text security breach tell us about President Trump’s cabinet’s approach to blame and accountability?The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Eric Schmitt, Julian E. Barnes and Maggie Haberman sit down to make sense of the latest week.Guest: Eric Schmitt, a national security correspondent for The New York Times based in Washington.Julian E. Barnes, a reporter covering the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The New York Times.Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Analysis: President Trump takes government secrecy seriously. But only when it suits him.Intelligence officials faced a fresh round of questions about the Signal leak.A disregard for the rules trickles down from Mr. Trump to his aides.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the ongoing fallout from the signal-text security breach and what the first real crisis of President Trump's second term is telling us about his cabinet's approach to blame and accountability.
Chapter 2: Who are the journalists discussing the Signal breach?
I spoke with three of my colleagues, national security reporter Eric Schmidt, intelligence reporter Julian Barnes, and White House correspondent Maggie Haberman. It's Friday, March 28th. Are you all situated in that tiny little adorable studio?
We are. We are. Yep.
Okay, well, get comfortable, because you're really close to each other, and I appreciate it. And we're going to be here for a while. And you're going to be here for a little while. So, friends, welcome back to The Roundtable. Maggie, thank you for being here.
Michael, thank you.
Eric, welcome to this format of the show. I think your first time doing it.
Thank you, Michael.
And Julian, this is your second day in a row on the show, so thank you for your endurance.
Good to be with you again.
So you're all in D.C., I'm in New York. It is, just to timestamp this conversation in case anything changes, 11.30 a.m. on Thursday. The story that we are going to be spending the entire conversation focused on is what I think of as really the first major blow-up, blunder conversation
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Chapter 3: Was the information in the Signal texts classified?
perhaps even scandal, of Trump's second term, which is the signal text messaging security breach, in which Jeffrey Goldberg, who was a guest on the show earlier this week, editor of the Atlantic Magazine, became the recipient of this days-long series of text messages in which the most senior officials in the White House discuss plans for an attack on Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
And what we know through multiple days of disclosures from Jeff Goldberg and The Atlantic is that those texts were very detailed, down to the type of aircraft to be used, precise timing of attacks. And that's really where I want to start. Settle for us, if you can, was this information in these texts classified or not? Eric, what do you say?
Well, Pete Hegseth basically says, no, it was not classified. But we have talked to several senior military officials and pilots who have flown these missions who say it certainly had to have been classified when it was shared. Whether it was declassified perhaps after the fact is possible, but we don't know that.
And why do they say it has to be classified? Can you just explain that?
It was sent just two hours or so before the first strikes were to take place against the Houthis on March 15th. And you don't want this information getting out ahead of any attack because it puts, in this case, U.S. pilots at risk. And so almost by definition, officials are telling us this had to be classified at the time.
Julian, do you concur with that? Absolutely. I mean, there are ways to talk around classified information. You can be generalized. You can take out specifics. But that's not what happens with the details of the strike. Like, when you say, this kind of plane is taking off at this hour... That is highly classified for a reason. The reason being is if it fell in enemy hands, it could be actionable.
So that's why that kind of information, troop movement information prior to it being executed is always among the most classified information that the U.S. possesses.
Right, and I just want to give an example of some of the language in the text messages that were sent by Pete Hexeth, the defense secretary. This is a quote. 1410, more F-18s launch, parentheses, second strike package. 1415, so five minutes later, strike drones on target. So it's really specific. Maggie, do you have a sense of, given what—
Eric and Julian just said, why senior officials from the Trump administration who were on these text chains are so definitively denying that anything in those messages were classified.
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Chapter 4: How could the Signal breach endanger US soldiers?
Right. So you're saying the Houthis in Yemen are essentially a few degrees removed, potentially, from being able to obtain what was being said in this... text thread, in theory, and there's no indication that that happened, but that's why the specificity of the F-18s and the launch times matter, because their defense systems could then be kicked into higher gear.
Correct. And the Houthis aren't just a ragtag bunch of terrorists out there. They have acquired sophisticated air defense systems. They have shot at American ships with missiles. They have taken down a Reaper drone, which is a heavily armed attack drone. You know, Hegseth tells... exactly when the Reaper drones are going to take off.
If you had that, you would know when to put your people in position, when to arm your air defense systems to take down that drone. Now, the loss of a drone... isn't that bad, but if they knew when F-18 was going to come at them, they could be ready for that too. And that would have far greater consequences if an American pilot was shot down over Yemen.
Eric, you've spent some time talking to rank-and-file service members in the military about their reaction to all of this, the use of this platform, the level of detail, the danger it poses. may have posed to those carrying out the attack. What are they telling you?
Well, they're telling us they're angry, they're disappointed, because in a lot of ways, Pete Hexeth has come in and said, I'm one of you guys. I'm not one of the brass. I'm not one of these retired generals or retired lawmakers. I'm a rank-and-file guy. He wants to be one of the troops.
You know, I think he wanted to be able to show off a little bit of what the military was doing by demonstrating the detailed strikes that were coming. But I think people are just shocked that he would be talking about this on a commercial messaging app. And if they had been caught doing this, they would have been brought up on charges and maybe court-martialed.
This is how serious this kind of an issue is.
So in short, it sounds like all these folks are saying that this is not consistent with the version of Pete Hegseth that Pete Hegseth has presented in this short time that he's been running the U.S. military.
That's right. They're saying it's reckless, it's cavalier, and it's careless. All things that can get people killed in combat.
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Chapter 5: How are rank-and-file military members reacting to the breach?
It gets sucked in.
The claim here is that somehow Jeff Goldberg's number got sucked in. into his phone and then into his signal. I have signal on my phone. I'm sure all of you do. And that's not my understanding of how this works. Signal, essentially, is a reflection of the contacts in the rest of your phone.
And it's hard to imagine a phone just sucking up a prominent journalist's phone number from the ether, right? So what do we make of that explanation?
I think there was some story that was being told. It's not clear to me if it was by Waltz or by someone around Waltz, that he had been trying to add an aide, one of his own aides, and for whatever reason, Jeffrey Goldberg's number was under his aide's contact. Now, I've had people's numbers under the wrong name. in my phone before, but not somebody I work with closely.
And so that seemed to be what he was talking about with the sucked in. To say that that story has not been given a lot of credence within the White House would be an understatement.
Right. And it's easy to make a mistake in this app, potentially, like you said, which is why senior government officials, especially those who traffic in really confidential information, aren't supposed to communicate on an app like this.
And yet, the White House and everyone around the president are still hyper-focused on the mistake of a journalist being added to the chat, not the chat being the place where the conversation was happening. I want to go back to just Waltz for a second, because it does seem like the bat signal has gone out from the White House that Waltz is the problem here.
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Chapter 6: Who is responsible for the breach and what is the White House response?
And once that message has gone out, you see it reflected and amplified in the world of conservative media. Are we approaching the moment where that world has decided that Waltz needs to go? And is that a possibility?
Yes and yes. As you correctly observed, there is an ecosystem that exists now that goes into effect, that gives certain people antibodies and attacks a different organism. And so in this case— Hegseth has the antibodies. Hegseth and J.D. Vance and others on that chat. Mike Waltz does not. And so Trump— has been very reluctant to fire people this term.
I say this term as if we're two years in, we're 60 days in or so. Right. But he really regretted firing Mike Flynn, his first national security advisor, after he did in his first term. Flynn only lasted, you know, a handful of weeks. He has tried to avoid doing that so far. This is described to me by a number of people in and outside of, close to the White House, as an unsustainable situation.
Chapter 7: What is President Trump's reaction to the Signal breach?
So... And when things change remains to be seen, but there has been a steady drip, drip, drip. And Trump, as a number of people close to him have said to me, is never going to look at Mike Waltz the same way again. And once that happens, it's very hard to come back from.
Obviously, anything is possible, but most people in the administration do not think that Mike Waltz is going to be able to continue on for a very long time. Mm-hmm.
Let's talk about this broader question of accountability here.
Is there any possibility of an investigation into what happened here, or are we quite certain that that's just never going to happen for the reasons I think we talked about at the very beginning, which is that this administration is staffed with loyalists who have virtually no incentive to open an investigation that might lead somewhere bad, perhaps to one of the people with the antibodies, Maggie, like you just said?
Well, there's a small possibility here. I mean, Roger Wicker, the senator from Mississippi who leads the Armed Services Committee, he's been very critical repeatedly of Pete Hegseth. So he's been one of the few Republicans who has been unafraid to speak publicly. And he's raised the possibility that the Senate Armed Services Committee will look into this.
Now, will this be an investigation with real teeth? Will they back down when the White House pressures them to stop? Maybe. So there's no guarantees, but there's at least a possibility.
Yeah, but it's a narrow one because the attorney general signaled Thursday morning that where people really ought to be focusing their attention on is Joe Biden and on Hillary Clinton, and this is not going to be a focus for the Department of Justice.
I mean, there are going to be people in Trump's orbit and his supporters who say this approach overall, don't investigate, don't feel like you have to apologize for any of this, makes complete sense. Because in their minds, this is being totally blown out of proportion by Democrats and by the news media.
But I have to imagine a lot of the public, especially the moderate political public, is wondering, why not just issue some kind of mea culpa here? You know, just acknowledge it's not a great idea to have had this conversation on text and say so. Say we learned a valuable lesson. The stakes here were actually high and we're not going to do this again.
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