Democrats are determined to keep Signal-gate in the news as the White House and its Republican allies downplay the severity of the scandal.
“Since we learned about the disclosures from Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, the story has, of course, gotten larger,” Rep. Jim Himes, ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said at a House Democratic Caucus press conference on Tuesday. “We hear press reports that an allied country provided targeting information, and they were pretty upset about the disclosure of that information.”
Himes added that the intelligence committee, which he described as an “entity charged with oversight of these things,” has not yet received an “accounting of the breach.”
The Trump administration has tried its best to deflect from last week’s bombshell that top officials were discussing military plans on Signal — with a journalist unwittingly placed on the chat.
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“This case has been closed here at the White House as far as we are concerned,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday.
Pressed for findings on Tuesday, she repeated the same point.
“The case is closed and the president continues to have confidence in his national security adviser,” Leavitt said at a press briefing.
Democrats clearly don’t want to let the scandal fade into the background. In addition to hosting hearings and calling for Trump administration officials to be held to account, they have written letters calling for further probes and for contents of the underlying material that was disclosed to be turned over to Congress.
House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar called the Trump administration “careless.”
“It is increasingly clear that the Trump administration’s incompetence is jeopardizing our national security,” Aguilar said
Reps. Adam Smith and Chrissy Houlahan called for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to appear for hearings with both the House and Senate and for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to conduct an independent investigation into the matter.
“One big concern we have on the Armed Services Committee, what is the policy going forward?” Smith, the committee’s ranking member, said at the same press conference.
He argued that Hegseth’s response — in which he insisted nothing sensitive was discussed in the group chat — implies that there’ll be no new policies implemented that prevent officials from discussing sensitive matters on unencrypted platforms like Signal.
“Ideally, Secretary Hegseth should come over and talk to us,” he said. “But somebody from the [Department of Defense] should come over and explain what they’re going to do to make sure that the [operations security] actually is something that they care about, that they’re going to fix going forward.”
Top intelligence officials appeared at a Senate hearing last week and skirted away from their involvement in the chat. The matter is still playing out in the courts and in foreign policy; top Israeli intelligence officials were reportedly angry that sensitive intelligence they provided to the U.S. from a human intelligence source in Yemen was exposed.
Houlahan called for a bipartisan effort to address national security concerns and for Gabbard to investigate a “significant unauthorized disclosure of compromised and compromised information.”
“The only hope that I have is that in this world, the Director of National Intelligence has committed to following the law which would allow opening an investigation into this so that we can imagine a world where people are contrite,” Houlahan said. “Where people are nonpartisan, where people work for the people, where people are true leaders and have the same rules that the people that they lead have, and where they hold themselves accountable.”
“So this is the world that I hope that we can live in, and this is the world that we demand,” Houlahan added. “Because it’s the only world in which we will be safe.”
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Shifra Dayak, a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed reporting.
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