Director of National Intelligence Gabbard Does Not Recall Signal Chat Group Contents For Second Day
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee grilled senior intelligence officials over their involvement in a Signal group chat during a public Wednesday hearing, while the White House insisted that the contents of the chat were not classified.
“Everyone here knows that the Russians or the Chinese could have gotten all of that information, and they could have passed it on to the Houthis, who easily could have repositioned weapons and altered their plans to knock down planes or sink ships,” said ranking member Rep. Jim Himes (Democrat CT-04) in his opening remarks. “I think it is by the awesome grace of God that we are not mourning dead pilots right now”.
In response to questioning from Himes, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard repeated her statements from the Senate intelligence committee hearing the day before that she did not recall specific discussions of timing, weapons systems or targets in the chat group, but conceded that the messages printed and brought to the hearing were a “refresher”. Gabbard said that she did not have the “specifics” to determine whether the messages should have been classified Top Secret under guidelines issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or under Department of Defense guidelines, saying that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would be the classifying authority.
When questioned by Rep. Joaquin Castro (Democrat TX-20), National Security Agency Director Timothy Haugh declined to directly answer whether intelligence collected on a similar chat group run by senior Russian defense officials would be classified, saying that it would be classified depending not on its contents but on how it was obtained.
“If you did your job and collected it from the Russian foreign ministry and the national security adviser and the secretary of defense and the President’s chief advisor, there is no way, no way, having sat on this committee for nine years, that someone would come in with that information and give us something that says ‘Unclassified, you can walk out of this room with this information and give it to whoever you want’”, said Castro. “With all respect, you and I worked on the committee at the same time, Tulsi, you and I came in together, I’ve never had an issue or beef with you. (CIA Director) John (Ratcliffe), you and I are both from Texas, y’all know that’s a lie, that’s a lie to the country.”
Ratcliffe expressed frustration with the questioning, claiming that the questions were not about “real threats” to the United States. “No one has asked me about my second day on the job here, where I lit the fuse that led to a foreign government participating with us to capture one of the senior planners of the Abbey Gate bombing that killed 13 Americans.”
The hearing started shortly after The Atlantic published the full transcript of the chat group’s messages on airstrikes in Yemen, after the publication received a denial from the White House that the messages were classified.
During a Wednesday press conference in Jamaica, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that he was part of the chat group, describing the addition of The Atlantic editor in chief Jeffery Goldberg to the chat group as a “big mistake”. However, he reiterated the administration’s claims that the messages were not classified and did not contain “war plans”. “This was a description of what we could inform our counterparts around the world when the time came to do so”.