WASHINGTON — One day after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration had closed the case on the Signal chat of the United States' senior-most national security officials discussing plans to bomb Yemen, House Democrats reiterated their call for an investigation into the matter. 

What You Need To Know

  • House Democrats on Tuesday called for an investigation into a Signal group chat that included an Atlantic magazine editor and national security officials
  • Last week, The Atlantic revealed its editor-in-chief was included in a sensitive group chat about U.S. plans to attack Houthi rebels in Yemen
  • On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the "case is closed here at the White House as far as we are concerned"
  • Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said the committee hasn't received an accounting of the security breach other than what The Atlantic magazine reported

The chat became public to the world after officials inadvertently included The Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in the group, which included Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA director John Ratcliffe and numerous other senior White House and national security officials. The bombings, which began earlier this month and continue this week, have killed dozens in Yemen, with local health officials in the rebel Houthi-controlled areas reporting women and children among the dead.

Democrats, and some Republicans, have demanded further investigation into the leak of sensitive, specific details about the planned attack and why the officials were using the messaging app Signal instead of the more secure systems set up for highly classified and sensitive dicussions. 

On Tuesday, House Democrats repeated their call for a further investigation and said the Trump administration was legally required to report its findings to key congressional committees.

"We have no accounting of the breach other than what we’ve gotten from Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic,” Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said at a press briefing Tuesday. “Mr. Goldberg was being very, very careful of what information he put out there, so at this moment, you don’t even know what information was in the Signal chat.”

Himes said the law requires the director of national intelligence, currently former Rep. Tulsi Gabbad, to undertake an investigation and to report the results of that investigation to the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. 

Last week, Gabbard told the House Intelligence Committee that the group chat with Goldberg was a “mistake” that included “candid and sensitive” details but did not contain classified information. Gabbard was in the group chat, according to The Atlantic. 

The back-and-forth texts on the commercial messaging app Signal included exact warplane launch and bomb drop times before U.S. military personnel began their mission earlier this month. Signal, a messaging app available to the public developed by a nonprofit foundation, encrypts communications but is not an approved method by the U.S. government for exchanging classified information.

Following news of the Signal chat leak, the National Security Council said it would investigate the leaked texts. On Monday, Leavitt said steps had been taken to “ensure that something like that can obviously never happen again,” without offering specifics, before saying the case had been closed.

House Democrats sent a letter to Gabbard on Monday requesting an independent assessment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and other Trump administration officials using the Signal app. 

“We will be following up to make sure that this story is reported to Congress, that the whole damage or potential damage associated with this Signal chat is out there and that accountability is ultimately visited,” Himes said.

Washington Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said he is concerned about Hegseth’s insistence that no classified material was shared over the Signal app. 

“That clearly implies that they’re just going to keep doing it this way. Make no mistake about it. This is a very, very dangerous thing to be giving out attack plans. I don’t know why we’re having a conversation about why that is bad,” Smith said. “What we really want to know is what happened, how did you screw up and how are you going to fix it?” 

While House Democrats are calling for Hegseth to resign, Trump defended the defense secretary on Sunday in an interview with NBC News “Meet the Press” anchor Kristen Welker. He called the Signal incident “fake news,” adding, “I don’t fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts.”

On Tuesday, 31 Senate Democrats asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to appoint a special counsel to investigate if government officials broke federal criminal laws with the Signal app security breach.

“Appointment of a special counsel is appropriate where the department may have a conflict of interest or extraordinary circumstances are present, a criminal investigation is warranted, and it is in the public interest to appoint an outside special counsel to investigate the matter," the Senators wrote in a letter signed by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; and 29 others. "Such circumstances are clearly present here.”