Trump’s CIA Director Blames Biden Team For Allowing Communications On Signal App

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s CIA director, facing heat for participating in a discussion of an impending military strike on Yemen on a publicly available messaging app, on Tuesday blamed President Joe Biden’s administration for allowing the practice — an assertion that Biden White House officials denied.

John Ratcliffe, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that CIA officials loaded the Signal messaging program onto his work computer on his first day on the job and told him that it was a “permissible work use” for certain purposes. “That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration,” he said.

Former Biden officials, though, said that Signal was never permitted on their government phones.

“We were not allowed to have any messaging apps on our work phones,” said one former top national security official on the condition of anonymity. “And under no circumstances were unclassified messaging apps allowed to be used for transmission of classified material. This is misdirection at its worst.”

Ratcliffe was never asked during the hearing whether he monitored the group chat from that work computer at the secure CIA headquarters or from a phone outside the building. Other Biden officials called his explanation of his work computer a “deflection.”

Ratcliffe was among some dozen and a half top Trump administration officials who participated in a group chat preceding the March 15 U.S. military strike against Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen earlier this month — a chat that included, apparently inadvertently, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic and a longtime national security reporter.

Goldberg wrote that, just hours before bombs started falling, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth provided a detailed preview of what was to come, including what weapons would be used, over what period of time and in what sequence, as well as what the targets would be.

Such information is normally classified as top secret ahead of a military operation on the basis that its release to enemy combatants would endanger the lives of U.S. military service members conducting the raid.

But Ratcliffe testified on Tuesday that he had no recollection of such details appearing in the group chat. When New Mexico Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich asked him if the discussion at some point touched on “information on weapons packages, targets or timing,” Ratcliffe responded: “Not that I’m aware of.”

Ratcliffe on Tuesday also claimed he had not used Signal for discussion of classified information — suggesting that he did not believe the discussion of an imminent military operation was or should be “classified” — and then also defended the use of the app by national security officials because of its “end-to-end” encryption.

That defense, however, came despite an advisory last month from the intelligence community against using Signal because of a newly discovered “vulnerability.”

“Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ feature to spy on encrypted conversations,” stated the advisory obtained by HuffPost titled “Signal Vulnerability.”

The document also reminded readers that “third-party messaging apps” like Signal “are NOT approved to process or store nonpublic unclassified information.”

That language suggests that the ban on using Signal on government mobile devices that existed during the Biden administration remained in effect at the time of the last month’s advisory — suggesting that the entire group chat that included Ratcliffe, Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, top White House aide Stephen Miller and a dozen others — was conducted over their personal cell phones.

Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Jack Reed asked Gabbard multiple times whether she was using her personal or government phone on the group chat, but she refused to answer, citing an ongoing review by the National Security Council.

According to Goldberg, he was invited into the group chat by Waltz, who prior to joining Trump’s White House had been a Republican House member from Florida.

At the White House on Tuesday, though, Waltz claimed he had no idea how Goldberg had wound up in the group chat. “We are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” he said at a White House meeting with Trump and U.S. ambassadors.

Trump, asked whether Waltz should apologize for the episode, said there was no need. “No, I don’t think he should apologize. I think he’s doing his best. It’s equipment and technology that’s not perfect, and probably he won’t be using it again, at least not in the very near future,” he said.