Editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, says he received an invite on the encrypted messaging app Signal from an account labelled White House National Security Adviser Michael Waltz
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is alleged to have shared details of planned military strikes in the chat group, tells reporters "nobody was texting war plans"
Trump's national security team's chat app leak is a stunning failure, writes BBC's Anthony Zurcher
US President Donald Trump says he "doesn't know anything" about the group chat
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer leads calls among Democrats for an investigation of the "stunning breach"
"This is blatantly illegal and dangerous beyond belief," Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren says of the group chat breach. "Our national security is in the hands of complete amateurs," she said on social media.
"What other highly sensitive national security conversations are happening over group chat? Any other random people accidentally added to those, too?"
Republican Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski said: "Think about what we would do if Biden were president and this came out... we would raise the roof", according to a reporter for Semafor, external.
"It's going to be interesting to see if anybody loses their job over this," she added.
Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono posted: "Egregious, reckless, and illegal. No amount of spin can change that."
"It’s baffling. It’s shocking. It’s dangerous," says Samar Ali, a professor of politics and law at Vanderbilt University, saying that the text chain appeared to be "a clear violation of our national security laws and our archive norms".
Sensitive government communications are required to take place in a sealed-off room called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), Ali says.
Ali says these rooms are “virtually impossible to penetrate,” unlike the messaging app Signal.
Ali speaks from experience, recalling when she once used a SCIF to hash out negotiations between the US and EU.
One question Ali raises with me is what accountability those involved in the Signal chat might face? She notes that she would have lost her job and security clearance if she committed similar violations.
Some of the Signal messages National Security Adviser Michael Waltz sent to the chat were set to disappear after one week, Jeffrey Goldberg reported in his article for The Atlantic.
That raises concerns about two federal laws that require the preservation of government records: the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act.
“The law requires that electronic messages that take place on a non-official account are preserved, in some fashion, on an official electronic record keeping system," said Jason R Baron, a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.
Such regulations would cover Signal, he said.
Official government communications are supposed to be either automatically archived, or the individuals involved are supposed to forward, copy, or preserve the messages.
“The open question here is whether these communications were automatically archived," Baron told the BBC. "It's not clear whether that occurred."
It was also unclear whether the individuals in the chat had taken other steps to preserve the records.
The use of Signal to discuss the military strikes also raised security questions.
“Assuming that any of the conversations on Signal could be considered classified, then under Department of Defense guidance those communications should have taken place on a classified government network, or on a network with government-approved encrypted features," Baron said.
“We should all be concerned about the use of these electronic messaging apps to evade federal record keeping requirements," he said.
Mara Karlin, who served under six Secretaries of State and was assistant Secretary of Defence, told the BBC the story from The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg is "stunning" and "not normal".
Karlin says these types of conversation should take place in a secure space, in the Pentagon or in the situation room in the White House, not in a Signal group chat.
Karlin says she expects both allies and adversaries to pay attention to this, saying they will ask: "Can the US government keep sensitive information in a secure manner?"
Inspector general investigations and congressional investigations will be carried out, Karlin predicts.
"This is historic," she adds.
