Pete Goldberg, the Secretary of Defense, discusses Security in the Atlantic, where the Houthi attack happened, and how the Pentagon will investigate if the perpetrator is a civilian

It should be obvious to people that sharing plans for an attack hours before the attack could create problems, but let’s get a little bit more specific: The Houthis could move some of their weapons away from targeted locations. They could move senior officials away from targeted locations so that the strikes are less effective. They could choose to, for example, launch missiles themselves to attack before they are attacked, an action that could be incredibly costly in lives and in ships. Senior leaders could possibly be moved.

The administration is saying now that there was nothing classified in the chat and they weren’t really war plans, in many ways, casting aspersions on Goldberg’s integrity. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, attacked Goldberg when confronted with the facts, but he did not acknowledge his own wrongdoing. There is no officer alive whose career would survive a security breach.

I have observed this with my own eyes. I have been a part of this process. There would be a relief from command and an investigation into possible criminal charges. In the military, you would be advising an officer to seek counsel, to get a lawyer instantly, because the criminal investigation would be equally instant.

Pete Hegseth is a civilian and he should be investigated by the Department of Justice for how this happened. The Department of Justice needs to address a lot of the questions that arise. The Pentagon has warned military people not to use the Signal app, which is used for Department of Defense business. Who was talking to someone? Were they posting in it directly? Were they posting through subordinates? How often is sensitive business being conducted on Signal?

The Atlantic conceded no such thing. It used the phrase attack plans in the headline, and anyone who is interested in military details can deduce that he revealed secret military details. The first strike window is Trigger Based and should begin when the Terrorist is located at his known location. This was roughly half an hour before the first warplanes took off, and a few minutes later he told the group that a group of sea-based Tomahawk missiles had been launched — all invaluable information to an enemy, including the exact time and nature of the attacks. After the assault was over, he told the group that the U.S. had a positive ID of a Houthi leader walking into a building that was bombed.

The new texts released by The Atlantic make it clear that members of the administration’s highest echelon — including Vice President JD Vance and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director — not only are terrible at operational security but also seem to have a vast disregard for the inconveniences that true security requires. For the past two days, in fact, it has become obvious that the administration’s definition of OPSEC is very different from a regular person’s. The term “bending reality” means only one thing to the White House, that is to make the official narrative of this embarrassment make an innocent administration look bad.

The White House press secretary wrote on social media Wednesday morning that the story was a hoax written by a Trump critic who was well-known for his sensationalist spin. The Atlantic had conceded, she said, that “these were NOT ‘war plans.’”