Was the information discussed in a group chat of senior administration officials really classified?
The information shared in the Signal messaging chat that inadvertently included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic was likely “far more sensitive” than “war plans,” according to Fox News’s chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin. President Donald Trump’s administration has been under fire after The Atlantic revealed that top editor Jeffrey Goldberg was included in the chat where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent detailed plans about an upcoming attack on Yemen.
Griffin reported Wednesday that the information discussed was most likely “classified,” according to former defense officials. She said the current and former U.S. defense officials agreed that “war plans” was not the correct term but what was sent “may have been FAR MORE sensitive given the operational details and time stamps ahead of the operation.”
“What Hegseth shared two hours ahead of the strikes were time sensitive ‘attack orders’ or ‘operational plans’ with actual timing of the strikes and mention of F18s, MQ9 Reapers and Tomahawks. This information is typically sent through classified channels to the commanders in the field as ‘secret, no forn’ message. In other words the information is ‘classified’ and should not be shared through insecure channels,” she wrote in a post on social media platform X.
She said these orders could put the “joint force directly and immediately at risk,” according to a former senior defense official.
“This kind of real time operational information is more sensitive than ‘war plans,’ which makes this lapse more egregious, according to two former senior US defense officials,” she said.
Another former senior U.S. defense official told her that it was “pure semantics” when Hegseth claimed he didn’t share “war plans.”
“If you are revealing who is going to be attacked (Houthis – the name of the text chain), it still gives the enemy warning. When you release the time of the attack – all of that is always ‘classified’,” the official told Griffin.
Griffin discussed her reporting on Fox News, reiterating that the texts went “beyond war plans” because they included the timing of the attacks.
But White House officials continue to insist no classified material was discussed in the March 13 to March 15 Signal chain and have launched scathing attacks on Goldberg. The Atlantic on Wednesday published the full content of the text exchange.
Hegseth, White House national security adviser Mike Waltz and other administration officials on Wednesday uniformly insisted that no “war plans” had been texted on Signal, a claim that current and former U.S. officials have called “semantics.”
War plans carry a specific meaning. They often refer to the numbered and highly classified planning documents — sometimes thousands of pages long — that would inform U.S. decisions in case of a major conflict, such as if the United States is called to defend Taiwan.
But the information Hegseth did post — specific attack details selecting human and weapons storage targets — was a subset of those plans and was likely informed by the same classified intelligence.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Stories by Lauren Sforza
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