“Deliberations should be conducted through classified channels,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Tuesday. He was speaking during a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee that took place just a day after The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeff Goldberg revealed that he had been inadvertently added to a group chat in which senior Trump administration officials discussed and shared plans to bomb Yemen. 

On Monday, Goldberg’s bombshell report detailed how he had been added to a Signal group chat titled “Houthi PC small group.” In it, Trump Cabinet members and officials including Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (who also testified at the hearing), Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and others debated the merits and timing of bombing Yemen in order to check the Houthi insurgency. They also received detailed strike plans from Hegseth the day of the March 15 air strike campaign, according to Goldberg. 

Tuesday’s hearing was supposed to discuss the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community Instead, the hearing zeroed in on how the leading members of the intelligence community had found themselves entangled in such a colossal screw-up. Ratcliffe and Gabbard were grilled for almost two hours by Democrats. You could almost forget that FBI Director Kash Patel had also been summoned to testify. 

Much of the questioning centered around the sharing of highly sensitive — potentially classified — information about the strikes on an app that, while it purports to be safe and encrypted, is not an authorized medium for sharing classified materials. 

Gabbard and Ratcliffe both claimed that no classified materials had been shared in the text discussion. At the same time, Gabbard refused to confirm that she’d even been in the chat, some version of the phrase “I do not recall” was used liberally by both witnesses, and the DNI repeatedly declined to answer questions because the incident is “under review by the National Security Council.” At one point Ratcliffe seemed to indicate that he no longer had access to the chat while skirting a question about its contents. 

At one point, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) asked Gabbard why a “detailed operation plan, including targets, the weapons we were going to be using, and timing” — like the one reportedly shared by Hegseth in the chat — wouldn’t be classified.

Gabbard again said that no classified information was shared in the chat, and deferred to Hegseth and the National Security Council on the security status of materials in the chat. 

“You’re the head of the intelligence community, you’re supposed to know about classifications,” King quipped. 

During his allotted time, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) asked Ratcliffe if he would consider “the deliberation between principals in our national security apparatus about whether or not to strike another country” to be classified information?” 

Ratcliffe replied that those types of discussions should “be conducted through classified channels.” 

It was clear throughout that the pair had spun themselves into a tangle of contradictions, at one point Ranking Member Mark Warner (D-Va.) called out the notion that “somehow, well, none of this was classified, but we can’t talk about it here.” 

“You can’t have it both ways,” he added. 

Warner and other Democrats on the committee repeatedly insisted that if the information distributed in the chat was not classified, the witnesses should have no issue providing a copy of its contents to the committee for review. When Ratcliffe claimed that his communications “in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information,” Warner countered: “If it’s not classified, share the texts with the committee.” 

Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff — the last Democrat to question the witnesses — asked Ratcliffe point plank if he felt what had happened had been “a huge mistake.” 

“No,” Ratcliffe responded, describing the addition of Golberg to the chat as an “inadvertent mistake.” 

Ossoff drilled down: “There has been no apology, there has been no recognition of the gravity of this error.” 

“And by the way, we will get the full transcript of this chain, and your testimony will be measured carefully against its content,” he warned.