Fox's John Roberts shrugs off Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accidentally leaking war plans: “There probably are worse people that you could text your secret plans to”
Roberts: “National security was compromised from the standpoint that you did invite an outsider who doesn't have top-secret security clearance into the group, but nothing else untoward happened”
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From the March 24, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Story with Martha MacCallum
JOHN ROBERTS (FOX ANCHOR): Well, let's put it this way, it's not bad from the perspective that the operation against the Houthis that was launched on March 15th was compromised at all. What's bad about it is that there were 18 people who were on this text chain, who are highly ranking administration officials, national security, like the vice president, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, the director of national intelligence, the CIA director, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, Michael Waltz, the national security advisor, and, apparently, Jeffrey Goldberg, who is the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine.
Now, I would think that there probably are worse people that you could text your secret plans to, but it appears that Goldberg has acted responsibly here in writing this article. And while he outs a lot of the process of what happened, he did not specifically publish the war plans as they apparently were transmitted to him by Pete Hegseth the morning of the attacks against the Houthis.
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BILL HEMMER (HOST): Signal is one of these apps where you're supposed to be able to message someone in secret. I don't know how secret it is, John, in the end, or how private it might be. But a lot of reporters in Washington use it. And a lot of members of government use it as well, do they not?
ROBERTS: I talked to some folks in the intelligence community, retired from the intelligence community, who believe that Signal is still -- is pretty much protected, like the Russians and the Chinese have not hacked into it just yet. So, it's likely that the communications between this group were secure. It's just the idea that you accidentally invite into the group the editor-in-chief of a magazine that's not particularly kind to the Trump administration. National security was compromised from the standpoint that you did invite an outsider who doesn't have top-secret security clearance into the group, but nothing else untoward happened. But I'll tell you, this would count as a BFD, according to people that I've talked to, and it will likely be looked into quite thoroughly.