Cabinet members in Donald Trump’s administration have encountered a significant security breach while discussing secret military plans for recent US attacks on the Houthi armed group in Yemen. Key figures, including the vice-president, JD Vance, the defense secretary Pete Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, used the commercial chat app Signal to discuss plans but also included a prominent journalist in the group.

The incident has met with outrage in the US, with calls for investigations and concerns raised over the administration’s handling of intelligence shared by former allies. The discussions seen by the journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic Magazine, include comments from Vance on the urgency of attacking Yemen, and conversations over potential prices for the removal of threats to key global shipping routes. US security and intelligence commentators have described the operational security breach as unprecedented, both for the use of a commercial chat service and for the inclusion of Goldberg.

The breach comes as a result of an inadvertent addition of the journalist to the Signal chat group, which is not approved by the US government for sharing sensitive information. This incident is likely to heighten concerns over the security practices of the Trump administration and its trustworthiness with intelligence shared by its allies.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/24/journalist-trump-yemen-war-chat