Virginia senator Mark Warner reacts to Signal group chat fiasco

During a heated Senate hearing Tuesday, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee grilled the nation’s top security officials about their participation in a Signal group chat and accidentally discussing war plans with a journalist.

Among the senators reprimanding members of the Trump administration was ranking member Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, who slammed the incident as “mind-boggling.”

“You’ve got this senior level of individuals communicating on this non-classified channel and plain sloppiness put a journalist on and nobody bothered to check who’s this other person on the line,” Warner told All Things Considered‘s Ailsa Chang.

The hearing, previously scheduled, came a day after Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, revealed he was mistakenly added to a group chat where the nation’s top security officials discussed highly sensitive plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen.

“It was a chilling thing to realize that I’ve inadvertently discovered a massive security breach in the national security system of the United States,” he said in an interview with All Things Considered.

Speaking to reporters after the Senate hearing, President Trump downplayed the massive security breach. “There was no classified information, as I understand it,” Trump said, adding that many people in the government use Signal.

During the Senate hearing, Warner described the actions of the nation’s top intelligence officials as “sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior.”

“If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired,” he said.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights