Here are the Signal chat ‘war plans’ Donald Trump insists aren’t classified

‘War plans’ shared by top Trump officials on an infiltrated Signal group chat have been published for the first time.

Ever since Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he’d accidentally been included in a group chat where plans for air strikes against Houthi militias were discussed, Trump’s team has denied the information was ‘classified’.

‘Nobody was texting war plans’, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump himself weighed in to say: ‘It wasn’t classified information.’

But the messages, published today by The Atlantic, tell a different story.

Opening the chat, national security adviser Mike Waltz said he was ‘establishing a principles group for coordination on Houthis’.

The Houthis are an Iran-backed militia in Yemen, from where they have been launching missiles against US ally Israel and western shipping through the Red Sea.

In the chat, Hegseth, Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, discussed whether to move ahead with air strikes against the Houthis in order reopen shipping lanes. They agreed.

Then came almost minute-by-minute detail of US military operations on March 15.

‘Weather is favourable’, Hegseth said at 11.44am. ‘Just CONFIRMED w/ CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.’

In half an hour, he said, F-18 fighter jets would set off to launch a strike on a ‘target terrorist’ two hours after his message was sent.

By 2.15pm, more F-18s would have been dispatched, and drones would be ‘definitely’ dropping bombs, he told the group.

‘I will say a prayer for victory’, Vance replied.

Later, Waltz revealed the ‘first target’ – the Houthis’ ‘top missile guy’ – had walked into a building before it collapsed from the US military’s first strike.

But it may not have gone to plan had Goldberg been ‘someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media’, the journalist wrote in The Atlantic today.

Maybe, as Trump’s team says, the information revealed to Goldberg wasn’t classified’, but this could have meant ‘the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds’.

Goldberg said: ‘The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.’

Waltz has sought to downplay the significance.

Responding to the publication of the messages, he wrote on social media: ‘No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS. Foreign partners had already been notified that strikes were imminent. BOTTOM LINE: President Trump is protecting America and our interests.’

The US National Security Council has confirmed the text chain ‘appears to be authentic’.

Senator Gary Peters, the most senior Democrat on the Senate security committee, said: ‘This is a flagrant failure and a huge breach of national security.

‘Our servicemembers deserve more from those in command. The carelessness of this level is simply unacceptable.’

Members of the group chat appear to be shifting the blame to Hegseth.

‘The Secretary of Defense is the original classification authority for determining whether something is classified’, CIA Director John Ratcliffe testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

‘As I’ve understood from media reports, the Secretary of Defense has said the information was not classified.’

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