Signal Chat Caught Trump Officials Cheering Destruction Of Entire Building To Kill 1 Man

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s top national security officials Wednesday defended their use of an unsecure messaging app to share details of a military strike on Yemen — as well as their cheers for the destruction of an entire building in their efforts to kill a single suspected Houthi terrorist.

“Building collapsed,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote shortly after the March 15 air strikes began in a group chat on Signal that inadvertently included a journalist. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and now it’s collapsed.”

“Excellent,” Vice President JD Vance wrote in response.

National security adviser Mike Waltz, who had invited Atlantic editor and longtime national security reporter Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat days earlier, responded with emojis of a fist, an American flag and a flame.

It’s unclear how big the building destroyed in the effort to kill a single targeted terrorist was, or how many civilians were killed and injured in that particular strike. Neither the White House nor the Department of Defense responded to HuffPost queries on the matter.

Houthi leaders claimed that 53 people, including five children, were killed in the air strikes, which included missiles from Navy fighter planes, sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles and armed drones.

A top national security official from the preceding Joe Biden administration said that avoiding civilian deaths and injuries was always a factor when deciding whether to conduct military strikes against the Iran-backed Houthis as well as other targets.

“It was always a consideration. Always,” the former official said on condition of anonymity. “And we would not take a strike if the possibility of civcas [civilian casualties] could not be mitigated.”

Beyond the ethical issue of killing uninvolved civilians, Biden officials frequently argued, was the pragmatic one: Killing and injuring non-combatants creates hostility toward the United States and leads to the recruitment of even more terrorists within a short period of time.

The Biden official also said that, contrary to Trump administration claims, the new operations are basically the same strikes against the same set of targets. Trump administration officials have claimed their new effort was a dramatic change from what took place under the Biden administration and would result in the end of attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea.

“No substantive difference,” the official said. “We hit military targets, weapons caches, launch sites, radar. The whole apparatus was put in place under our watch.”

The March 15 strikes have not had any noticeable effect on bringing shipping traffic back through the Red Sea, and experts believe it would take months or even longer for that to happen.

Trump and his aides, nevertheless, continued to claim Wednesday that their actions, unlike those under Biden, have been a tremendous success. “They have been hit harder than they’ve ever been hit,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “The attacks have been very successful even beyond our wildest expectations.”

“Our ongoing campaign against the Houthis has been devastatingly effective,” Hegseth told reporters at an event in Hawaii.

Neither Hegseth nor others, though, would answer basic questions about the group chat, including why Signal was used despite specific guidance from the intelligence community that it be avoided for nonpublic information.

The Atlantic on Wednesday released screenshots of the entire chat — with the exception of the name of a CIA officer who participated — after Trump and advisers repeatedly claimed Tuesday that no “war plans” were shared nor was any classified information revealed. Those screenshots showed that Hegseth at first gave the 16 other Trump officials on the chat (and Goldberg) a detailed timeline of the impending attack, including which planes would be used and what time they would launch from an aircraft carrier.

He then gave details on how the attack was going in real time — including information about the targeted suspected terrorist that provided hints as to how that intelligence was gathered. Further, had the timeline been available to Houthi fighters when it was made available to Goldberg, it could have endangered the lives of the air crews taking part in the raid.

Trump officials across the administration refused to answer HuffPost queries on what sorts of devices — computers versus phones; government-issued versus personal — the various participants had used to log onto the Signal chat. CIA Director John Ratcliffe testified in the Senate on Tuesday that Signal was loaded onto his work computer, but he did not say how he participated in the group chat.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Wednesday testified to House members that Signal comes “pre-installed” on government devices — which, if correct, represents a completely new policy. The app had been prohibited on government devices under the Biden administration.

Trump aide Steve Witkoff may have shed some light on the device issue Wednesday when he posted on social media that the only device he took with him on a trip to Russia two weeks ago was one issued by the U.S. government, which was the reason he did not participate in the group chat as the military strikes were taking place. “Guess why? Because I had no access to my personal devices until I returned from my trip,” he wrote, suggesting that when he finally did join the chat after the raid ended — he texted emoji of two sets of praying hands, a flexed bicep and two American flags — it was from his personal phone.