By Kanishka Singh and Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Democratic U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and top Senate Democrats on Wednesday wrote a letter to Republican President Donald Trump and his top officials urging a Justice Department probe into how a journalist was inadvertently included in a secret group discussion of sensitive war plans.
Trump administration officials have claimed no classified material was shared in the group chat on Signal, an encrypted commercial messaging app.
Democratic senators voiced skepticism, noting that the journalist, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted operational details about pending strikes against Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis, “including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
“We write to you with extreme alarm about the astonishingly poor judgment shown by your Cabinet and national security advisors,” the Democratic Senators wrote in Wednesday’s letter.
“Moreover, given that willful or negligent disclosure of classified or sensitive national security information may constitute a criminal violation of the Espionage Act or other laws, we expect Attorney General Bondi to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation of the conduct of the government officials involved in improperly sharing or discussing such information,” the letter added.
Trump said his administration would look into the use of Signal but voiced support for his national security team when questioned about the incident at a White House event on Tuesday with Michael Waltz, his national security adviser.
Trump said he did not think Waltz should apologize, but said he did not think Waltz and the team would be using Signal again soon.
Waltz, in an interview with “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News on Tuesday, said: “I take full responsibility” for the breach, as he had created the Signal group, but he emphasized there was no classified information shared.
Waltz said the situation was “embarrassing” and that the administration would “get to the bottom” of what went wrong. He said Goldberg’s number was not saved in his phone and he does not know how the journalist was mistakenly added to the chat group.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Mary Milliken and Michael Perry)
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