When Signal met the Senate
The Trump administration's spin on a colossal national security mistake didn't hold up under intense questioning.
By Brian O’Neill
If you read Monday’s piece in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg—and our breakdown here at The Contrarian—you already know the backdrop: senior Trump officials used Signal, a commercial encrypted messaging app, to coordinate a military strike, mistakenly added a journalist, and treated the entire episode like a PR rollout rather than a national security breach.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for the administration’s spin: The exposé landed just one day before the Senate Intelligence Committee’s already-scheduled Annual Threat Assessment hearing, forcing two of the officials involved—Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe—into the spotlight, under oath, and on the defensive.
The annual threat assessment hearing is typically one of the few public windows into how U.S. intelligence leaders view the world. But this year, its significance deepened. This was their first chance to answer for it. Instead, we got evasions, blame-passing, and a masterclass in how to dodge responsibility while insisting you’ve done nothing wrong.
Only after sustained questioning did Gabbard confirm she was “TG” that Goldberg said was on the chat. She went on, along with Ratcliffe, to claim repeatedly no classified information was shared. Yet when pressed, neither could clarify why military targeting details and strike timelines weren’t classified. They deferred to others, invoked vague definitions, and, most tellingly, refused to provide the committee with the actual messages.
Gabbard even suggested she wasn’t sure whether such messages should be classified—a stunning admission for the person overseeing the entire intelligence community. Ratcliffe, for his part, repeatedly leaned on the fact that Signal is encrypted, ignoring entirely whether its use was appropriate, authorized, or consistent with federal records laws.
Senators like Angus King of Maine and Jon Ossoff of Georgia were visibly incredulous. Republicans who often rail against security lapses stayed mostly silent. Chairman Tom Cotton of Arkansas didn’t mention the breach at all in his opening statement.
This hearing could have been an opportunity to draw a line between public service and political performance. Instead, it confirmed how blurred that line has become. And the Signal leak that began as a scandal has now become a litmus test: for security standards, for institutional integrity, and for whether Congress is still willing to act when the stakes are this high.
As if the story needed one more punchline: According to a Tuesday report from NPR, days after Goldberg was accidentally looped into the Signal chat, the Pentagon issued a department-wide advisory warning against using the app—even for unclassified information—citing Russian hacking groups exploiting its “linked devices” feature. The memo reinforced a 2023 directive already prohibiting Signal’s use for non-public official business. That the nation’s top security officials used it to coordinate a military strike wasn’t just reckless—it ignored existing guidance and highlighted a culture of indifference toward even the most basic protocols.
Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech.
There is no red line for Trumps administration. They are reckless, unethical, ruthless, and entirely unprincipled. They have probably shared with enemy countries (Russia for instance) information that compromises our national security, tarnishes our reputation, and makes enemies of our former allies. Republicans in Congress have shown a complete unwillingness to regard anything Trump and staff do, as something that needs to be addressed. Mike Johnson today was talking about taking out our lower Federal Court system. Regardless of the hearings that are occuring today, nothing is going to be done. The last line of defense will be the voters, who must vote everyone in this criminally inclined administration out of office.
If this were an episode of Veep, it'd be too far fetched to be funny.