Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) says Republican senators will get to the bottom of how Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, got added to a group chat among senior Trump administration national security officials, during which classified details about a military strike against Houthi rebels were disclosed.
“We’re just finding out about it, but obviously we’ve got to run it to ground and figure out what went on there,” Thune told reporters Monday when asked if he was concerned about the leak and whether the Senate would investigate the security breach.
“We’ll have a plan,” he added.
Thune spoke to reporters shortly after Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, called the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist on a group chat of senior national security officials “a huge screwup.”
“Sounds like a huge screwup. I mean, is there any other way to describe it?” Cornyn told reporters at the Capitol Monday.
Senate Democrats slammed Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz and others for discussing details about missile strikes on a commercially available app and failing to take pains to ensure the identities of the individuals on the chat.
“This is one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence I have read about in a very, very long time. What we have here are senior U.S. leaders, including the vice president and secretary of Defense, having classified discussions of military action over an unsecure app,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Monday.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that if senior defense officials did indeed discuss military planning on an unsecure app, it “represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen.”
