Taylor Swift name-dropped in Senate hearing on leaked Signal war chat
As one of the most famous people on the planet, Taylor Swift has probably come to expect that her name will be invoked in all kinds of situations. But even she must wonder how she became a talking point in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday.
It turns out that Swift’s name came up as outraged senators sought an explanation for how top Trump officials inadvertently included a journalist in a group chat about detailed plans to bomb Houthi militia forces in Yemen. At one point, the hearing shifted to concerns about hostile, belittling comments that Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made about America’s European allies.
Outraged by those comments, Virginia Senator Mark Warner grilled the nation’s top intelligence officials on the dangers of alienating allies, TMZ reported. To Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Kash Patel, Warner brought up a thwarted terrorist attack, plotted against Swift in Austria last summer, as one example of the benefits that the United States gains by sharing crucial security information with allies.
“That sharing of information saves lives, and it’s not hypothetical — we all remember, because it was declassified — last year when Austria worked with our (intelligence) community to make sure to expose a plot against Taylor Swift in Vienna that could have killed literally hundreds of individuals,” Warner said.
Last August, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies provided intelligence to Austrian law enforcement that allowed them to disrupt an ISIS-inspired plot to attack a Taylor Swift Eras Tour concert in Vienna, CNN reported. The plot was “quite advanced” and threatened to kill “tens of thousands of people at this concert, (potentially) including many Americans,” a top CIA official said at the time.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Warner said he was particularly troubled by the way that the Trump administration seems to have decided “that we can take on all our problems by ourselves, without any needs for friends or allies.”
“I agree we need to make America’s priorities first, but America first cannot be America alone,” Warner continued. “The intelligence we gather to keep Americans safe depends on a lot of allies around the world who have access to sources we don’t have.”
Vance and Hegseth’s antagonist comments about European allies were disclosed in a bombshell story published Monday by Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed how he was was accidentally included in a group war-planning chat carried out by Trump officials on the Signal messaging app.
Among other things, the comments seen by Goldberg and revealed in his story give a view into the thinking of the people directing U.S. foreign policy, CNN said. While Trump administration officials have not kept their disdain for Europe quiet, their “contempt” came across even louder in their not-so-secret war-planning sessions, as the New York Times reported.
“I just hate bailing out the Europeans again,” Vance said, asserting that the strikes on the Houthis, who had been disrupting key international shipping routes in the Red Sea for months, would benefit Europe far more than the United States.
“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Hegseth later replied. “It’s PATHETIC.”
Another member of the chat, identified as “SM,” and believed to be Stephen Miller, a top aide to President Trump, suggested that both Egypt and “Europe” should compensate the United States for the operation. “If Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the U.S. successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” SM wrote.
Goldberg said he had never seen a security breach “quite like this.” He said the Signal app is primarily used by national-security officials for meeting planning and other logistical matters — “not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action.”
“And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion,” he said.
The New York Times said that the comments, painting Europeans “as geopolitical parasites,” is the latest blow to one of the world’s most storied alliances” — the United States and European nations — which took generations to build and strengthen but which the Trump administration has managed to weaken in mere weeks.
“It is clear that the trans-Atlantic relationship, as was, is over, and there is, at best, an indifferent disdain,” Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs, who formerly advised a top E.U. official, told the Times. “And at worst, and closer to that, there is an active attempt to undermine Europe.”