GOP Senators Join Calls for Probe of Signal Breach

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is calling for an inspector general investigation of the Signal breach. After the release Wednesday of the full exchange between top-level officials discussing a strike on Yemen, Wicker said he and Sen. Jack Reed, the panel's top Democrat, would seek an expedited review from the Defense Department's Office of Inspector General, CBS News reports. Wicker is the first Republican to call for an independent review of the chat that the Atlantic editor-in-chief was accidentally invited to join, per the New York Times. Other GOP senators are calling for committee investigations, reports the Hill.

• "I would have wanted it classified." Intelligence officials have insisted that the information in the chat, including the timing of the strikes and the weapons used, was not classified, but the information "appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature that, based on my knowledge, I would have wanted it classified," Wicker said Wednesday.
• Semantics. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials argue that no "war plans" were shared, though critics call the claim "semantics." War plans are documents thousands of pages long, but the attack details shared on Signal were "a subset of those plans and was likely informed by the same classified intelligence," the AP reports.

• Rubio: "Someone made a big mistake." "Obviously, someone made a mistake. Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist," Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the officials involved in the group chat, said Wednesday. "Nothing against journalists. But you ain't supposed to be on that thing." Asked if the information was classified, Rubio said the Pentagon said it wasn't.
• Leavitt won't rule out firings. During a press briefing Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to rule out the possibility of somebody being fired over the breach, Politico reports. "What I can say definitively is what I just spoke to the president about, and he continues to have confidence in his national security team," she said.
• Gabbard says she couldn't recall details. At a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, Democratic Rep. Jim Himes read out testimony from a Senate hearing from the previous day, before the Atlantic released further details, the Washington Post reports. He noted that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had told senators she couldn't recall if the Signal chat contained "information on weapons packages, targets or timing." He read out a message from Hegseth shared by Atlantic and said: "Less than two weeks ago, you were on a Signal chat that had all of this information about F-18s and MQ-9 Reapers and targets on strike, and you, in that two-week period, simply forgot that that was there? That's your testimony?" Gabbard responded that she had testified that she "couldn't recall the exact details."
• Trump calls response a "witch hunt." Asked Wednesday about his administration downplaying the scandal, the president said it was "all a witch hunt" and defended Hegseth, the Times reports. Asked if he still believed, following the release of the new details, that nothing classified had been shared, he said: "That's what I've heard. I don't know. I'm not sure, you have to ask the various people involved."

(More Signal breach stories.)