National security adviser Michael Waltz added the Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal Messenger group chat on March 11th. The group chat revealed the Trump Administration’s plans to drop bombs on Houthi forces in Yemen, and soon after the chat went silent the bombs struck.
The group chat involved various members of the Trump Administration, including vice president JD Vance, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Michael Waltz, and a few others. The group chat was meant to only be for members of the Trump Administration, though an alleged accident led to Goldberg being added.
“I take full responsibility,” Waltz said to Fox News. “I built the group.”
The group chat mainly focused on what course of action the administration would take on the Houthi forces in Yemen, who had been attacking shipping vessels in the Red Sea since 2023. Houthi has sunk two vessels and killed at least four sailors, and the organization’s leadership claims all of their attacks are aimed towards ending the Israeli war against Hamas.
In total, the Houthi soldiers have attacked over 100 vessels. Trump said on his own social media platform, Truth Social, that the Houthi’s “unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism” is the reason the U.S. is targeting them.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also made a statement, this one about the importance of the strikes.
“We’re doing the entire world a favor by getting rid of these guys and their ability to strike global shipping,” he said. “That’s the mission here, and it will continue until that’s carried out.”
Vice President Vance expressed confusion in the chat about why they were planning this attack.
“Three percent of US trade runs through the suez. Forty percent of European trades does,” he said.
He also believed that the US economy could take a hit from this involvement. “There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices,” he said to those in the group chat.
The Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, shared Vance’s beliefs. “The Houthis will want to hit President Donald Trump where it hurts, oil price,” they said.
Waltz went on to explain their involvement in the conflict. “European navies do not have the capability to defend against the types of [weapons] the Houthis are now using,” he said. “It will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes.”
Trump has given a broad statement about his method of attack. “We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective,” he said.
Waltz also revealed that this action wouldn’t come freely.
“We are working with [Department of Defense] and State to determine how to compile the costs associated and levy them on the Europeans,” he said.
Vance, seeing this and with Hegseth’s explanation, was eventually swayed.
“If you think we should do it let’s go,” Vance said. “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”
Hegseth seconded Vance’s statement. “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading,” he said. “It’s PATHETIC.”
However, as this was Trump’s selected course of action, it was agreed upon to follow through with the bombings “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts,” Hegseth said, outlining the timeline of the operation after it was confirmed.
At 1:48 p.m., Waltz came back with a report of a successful strike. “Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID […] amazing job,” he said.
Around March 31st, Houthi rebels said the U.S. airstrikes killed at least three people. Strikes in Sana’a killed one person, and a separate strike in Haijah killed two people and wounded a child.
Hegseth himself made claims that he would incur an “unrelenting” assault until the rebels ceased their attacks on Red Sea ships. However, the rebels don’t plan on taking these hits quietly – they’ve declared that they would launch retaliatory airstrikes.
These bombings are something that has been going on even during Biden’s time in office. From January 2024 to December 2025, the US and UK have worked together to bomb Houthi over 260 times.
The Trump administration wanted to focus on this as they did their strikes. “Nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: [One,] Biden failed & [two,] Iran funded,” Hegseth said.
The second point made by Hegseth bases itself on the physical evidence and weapons that traced back to Iran’s capital, Tehran, implying Iran has been lending support to the Houthis. However, Tehran denies helping the rebels, as any admission could incur sanctions by a UK arms embargo on the Houthis.
The Eurasia Group made note of a key difference between Biden and Trump’s approaches to the strikes. “Although the U.S. has been striking at Houthi targets for over a year, the scope and scale of this new campaign, including the targeting of senior Houthi figures, marks a significant escalation in the conflict,” analysts at the group said.
Though multiple news stations have leaked images of the group chat Mike Waltz had created, Hegseth has recently been found by New York Times to have made a second group chat on Signal to share the information he got from Waltz’s group with his wife, brother, and around a dozen others.
Hegseth has already received some criticism in the past for including his family members in unnecessary affairs. His wife, for example, has been present in meetings with foreign leaders.
The Department of Homeland Security’s defense liaison, Phil Hegseth, is Pete Hegseth’s younger brother. According to the Guardian, there is no clear reason why Phil would need to know about these plans.
Pete Hegseth’s former press secretary John Ullyot wrote an opinion article about these issues. “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon,” he said. “From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president – who deserves better from his senior leadership.”
The White House has now started looking for someone to replace Hegseth, according to a U.S. official who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. “He’s doing a great job – ask the Houthis how he’s doing,” Trump said on X in defense of him.
All of these leaks had the potential to endanger the pilots if the info was gathered by the wrong people. Two American drones have been shot down by the Houthis at this time.
Hegseth also denied the allegations against him. “This is what the media does, they take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees… It’s not going to work with me,” he said.
The “former employees” he was referring to were senior advisors who suddenly left the Pentagon. These employees were Ullyot, Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll, and Darin Selnick.
Additionally, the Times said that Caldwell, Carroll and Selnick were present in the group chat. These three were fired after being accused of leaking unauthorized information.
The trio released a statement on X to address their release. “All three of us served our country honorably in uniform… we understand the importance of information security and worked every day to protect it,” they said.
New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen also voiced her opinion on Hegseth’s situation. “Ultimate responsibility lies with President Trump for selecting a former weekend TV host, without any experience leading a… complex organization, to run our government’s biggest department,” she said.
In the aftermath of the strikes and the group chat leak, the transparency nonprofit American Oversight has sued five cabinet members for the use of Signal to discuss and share strike plans. The lawsuit calls Hegseth, Rubio, CIA director John Ratcliffe, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and the National Archives as defendants in this case.
American Oversight’s lawsuit says emergency relief is needed to “prevent the unlawful destruction of federal records.” Discussions of plans like these are required by law to be documented, and Signal automatically deletes messages after a set period of time.
The lawsuit continues on to emphasize this. It states its other purpose is “to compel Defendants to fulfill their legal obligations to records and to preserve and recover federal records created through unauthorized use of Signal for sensitive national security decision-making.”
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has been appointed to preside over the suit in court. Boasberg has already been handling another case against the Trump administration, which was over the deportation flights they’ve been conducting.
Because of this, the White House has been publicly calling for his impeachment as a judge. People like White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt have called Boasberg a “Democrat Activist”, and Trump has called him a “radical left lunatic” on Truth Social.
American Oversight goes into further detail about the specific laws and details of the allegedly violated Federal Records Act.
“Messages in the Signal chat about official government actions, including… national security deliberations, are federal records and must be preserved in accordance with federal statutes, and agency directives, rules, and regulations,” the lawsuit said.
