Brandon Livesay
Reporting from New York

News comes out of Trump’s White House at such a relentless pace that stories can seemingly vanish into the background, steamrolled by the president’s latest Truth post or executive order.

But Signalgate, as this scandal has been dubbed, is the rare story with staying power.

When Trump announced a new tariff in the Oval Office this afternoon, he told a reporter who asked about Signal to “hold on one second” so he could find someone else who would ask him about tariffs.

Trump did end up taking questions on the Signal group chat, and the president distanced himself from the scandal. Asked if he was sure no classified material was shared, he said “that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know”.

It's a scaled back take, compared to what many in his administration said today - they've been adamant that no classified materials were shared.

That downplaying of the details in the group chat are what spurred The Atlantic to publish more messages from defence secretary Pete Hegseth today, Goldberg told the BBC.

We’re pausing our live coverage for the day, but there’s a whole lot of further reading you can get stuck into here:

• Three sensitive messages from Yemen strike Signal chat unpacked and explained
• Trump officials attack journalist after Signal leak published in full
• Read the messages Trump officials exchanged on leaked Signal thread

During his interview with the BBC's Sarah Smith, Jeffrey Goldberg says the Signal scandal involved two key mistakes.

"There's a widespread feeling in the White House that Mike Waltz is an idiot, that’s the word that’s being used," Goldberg says of Trump's national security adviser, who inadvertently added the journalist to the group chat.

"Should you, as national security officials, be doing this on Signal on your phone?" Goldberg asks.

"And then the second part is obviously the ridiculous part, if you’re going to do it, try not to invite national security journalists into the conversation."

Goldberg claims the fallout from this scandal includes people at lower levels in the government "who believe there is a double standard".

"If you're an air force captain, currently working with the CIA and the State Department, and you mishandled sensitive information the way that they’ve obviously mishandled sensitive information, you’d be fired, you’d be prosecuted.

"A lot of people feel there is a level of hypocrisy here."

During their interview, BBC's Sarah Smith and Jeffrey Goldberg spoke about the White House's comment that tech billionaire Elon Musk would look into how Goldberg was added to the Signal group chat.

"I could save everybody a lot of time by simply saying he (National Security Adviser Mike Waltz) sent me a message request and I accepted it, I don’t know what else to do."

"And next thing I know I’m in this very strange chat group with the national security leadership of the United States.

"Just at the technical level, in order to connect with somebody on Signal, your phone number has to be in their phone," Goldberg says.

Goldberg tells the BBC he has met Waltz on several occasions, but he declines to comment on how well he knows him.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt spent a considerable amount of time in her briefing today criticising Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in chief of The Atlantic who was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat with top US officials.

Among many things, Leavitt called Goldberg an "anti-Trump hater" who peddles hoaxes.

Speaking with the BBC, Goldberg says "if I'm all those things, why would they invite me to the chat?"

"They say these things about me for years... This is their move. You never defend, just attack.

"So I'm sitting there, minding my own business. They invite me into this Signal chat and now they're attacking me as a sleaze bag, I don’t even get it.

When asked if he worried about the possibility of the Trump administration trying to prosecute him over the saga, he says: "I never worry about anything like that."

More now from Sarah Smith's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic.

In the first article on the Signal group chat, Goldberg intentially left out some details that he thought were sensitive.

Today, he published many of those details.

Goldberg tells the BBC he reached out to leaders in the intelligence community and asked if safety would be compromised by publishing the messages.

The CIA asked him to redact a piece of information from the message and he said the magazine agreed because "we take this sort of thing seriously and don’t want anybody hurt or compromised".

"[The CIA] didn't come back with anything substantive, some of them didn’t even answer our queries, and at a certain point, the public interest comes into play," he says. "And we felt like the people of the United States should read these texts from their leaders themselves and then make the decision if this was a wise thing to do, to do this on Signal, do this on a commercial non-government messaging app."

The BBC's North America editor Sarah Smith spoke with The Atlantic's editor Jeffrey Goldberg in the wake of his explosive story about being added to a Signal chat group with top Trump administration officials.

Today, the White House has vigorously defended the group chat, saying no war plans were shared and no classified information was texted.

Goldberg tells the BBC the text messages seem like "sensitive, war-planning information to me".

"This is why we put the all the information on our website, just so people can read themselves and make up their own minds," Goldberg says.

Goldberg says the Trump administration is blaming reporters rather than "actually acknowledging that they have a massive national security breach, and that they should just go fix it".

"The administration is more interested in calling me bad names, which is fine, they've done that for years.

"I mean, that's, that's the point," he says. "That's the point about leadership. Leadership, you deal with your mistakes, try to make things better, move on. But that's not the playbook here."

The Signal chat leak "doesn't bother me", Trump tells reporters in the Oval Office.

The president goes on to suggest that Signal may be a "defective" platform and "isn't very good".

"Everybody uses signal, but it could be a defective platform, and we're gonna have to find that answer," Trump says

He offers no evidence as to why he thinks the Signal app could be defective.

For context, Signal is the publicly available messaging app that was used by top US officials to discuss military strikes on Houthis. Trump's national security adviser Mike Waltz inadvertently invited a journalist to that group chat.

Image source, Getty Images

President Trump is asked who was responsible for the Signal leak.

"Mike Waltz, I guess he claimed responsibly," Trump says about his National Security Advisor. "I was told it was Mike."

He adds that Waltz "took responsibility" and that no other of his officials are responsible.

"Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this."

Trump also speaks about the success of the military strike on Houthi targets, saying it was "beyond our wildest expectations".

He says the strikes will continue "for a long time".

Asked about the Signal scandal, Trump claims it is a "witch hunt" that is being overhyped by the media.

He goes on to says he had "nothing to do with it" and "wasn't there", and that the US campaign against Yemen's Houthis is going well.

When asked if there was classified information sent in the Signal chat, he says "I don't know," but he has "heard" that there wasn't. "I really don't know," he says.

"You'll have to ask the various people involved."

Image source, Getty Images

President Trump has just announced new tariff measures at an event inside the Oval Office.

He's now taking questions from reporters and we're expecting one or two about the Signal scandal.

You can follow all the action by pressing Watch live at the of the page.

We're expecting to hear from US President Donald Trump later today.

He is scheduled to speak in the Oval Office about tariffs, but he usually takes questions from reporters - so expect the president to be asked about the Signal chat group scandal.

Trump has previously said that nothing in the chat could have "compromised" the attack plans in Yemen, though he did admit a member of his team may have "screwed up".

The president yesterday said "there was no classified information, as I understand it" in the messages.

Earlier today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt re-iterated that stance.

Image source, EPA

The leader of the Republican majority in the Senate has said that those involved in the Signal chat affair had made a mistake and should own up to it.

“The important thing here is these guys, they made a mistake, they know it. They should own it and fix it so that never happens again,” John Thune told CNN.

When asked whether Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth should resign, the majority leader avoided answering and said that the strikes on the Houthis alluded to in the chat seemed to have been "pretty flawless".

What are war plans? The White House uses semantics to downplay leakpublished at 20:17 Greenwich Mean Time 26 March

20:17 GMT 26 March

Anthony Zurcher
North America correspondent

Image source, Reuters

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other members of the Trump administration, have spent a lot of time today talking about what the Signal group chat text messages were not.

They weren’t “war plans”, they didn’t include a detailed list of targets or specific military units, they didn’t contain detailed flight paths or routes, and they didn’t reveal intelligence sources of methods.

Trump officials have tended to avoid discussion of what was actually in those messages – including timings of the strikes, military assets used and post-strike damage reports – and whether sharing those details through a commercial messaging service put American national security at risk.

For an administration that regularly touts how it is restoring “common sense” to government, such misdirection and semantic wordplay may seem decidedly out of step with reality.

As the political pressure continues, the administration’s ability to hold this line will be tested.

Top of the news agenda today is the release of the full Signal group chat, which the US administration has repeatedly said did not include any classified information.

The new information includes a thread of messages apparently written by defence secretary Pete Hegseth, where he tells officials - and inadvertently The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg - specific timings of US strikes in Yemen.

Image source, Getty Images

A month before the breach of Signal group chat of high-level US officials was revealed, the National Security Agency (NSA) sent out an operational security special memo to its employees to caution them about using the encrypted messaging application, the BBC's US partner CBS News reports, citing internal NSA documents.

"A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application," the agency said in February. "The use of Signal by common targets of surveillance and espionage activity has made the application a high value target to intercept sensitive information."

The memo warned that Russian hackers were using phishing scams to get access to conversations on the application and bypassing encryption.

The agency also said that the application - as well as WhatsApp - were permitted for unclassified uses but not for communicating about more sensitive information, CBS reports.

Since the messages were first released there's been a distinct partisan divide in the reaction from lawmakers:

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly said "this is what happens when you put unqualified people in important jobs where lives are on the line," while Senator Ruben Gallego said "the incompetence and cover-up is embarrassing".

Some, including Gallego, have called for Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth's resignation. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi pushed this message while displaying larger print-out screenshots of the messages during a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee earlier today.

Republicans, meanwhile, have by and large defended their colleauges.

President Donald Trump has insisted that none of the information was classified, and "there was nothing in there that compromised" the operation - something reiterated by his press secretary earlier today.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said the administration has "acknowledged it was a mistake" to add the journalist to the chat, but "no one was jeopardised because of it". That was echoed by Senator Ted Cruz who called it a "screw up" but that the Trump administration "took responsibility" for it.

However one top Republican is among those calling for an official probe into the incident - Senator Roger Wicker said based on his knowledge, "I would have wanted it classified".

Image source, Getty Images

Secretary of State Marco Rubio just spoke to media in Jamaica, where he is on a state visit.

He's asked about the Signal scandal and says it's obvious that "someone made a big mistake and added a journalist".

"Nothing against journalists, but you ain't supposed to be on that thing," he says.

Rubio downplays his role in the Signal chat group, saying he messaged to identify his point of contact, and then messaged again after the strikes were carried out to offer his congratulations.

He says the information shared on Signal wasn’t intended to be made public, but says the Pentagon has said none of the information threatened the lives of service members.

The White House's strategy to deal with Signal controversypublished at 18:36 Greenwich Mean Time 26 March

18:36 GMT 26 March

Anthony Zurcher
North America correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

Karoline Leavitt, in her recently concluded White House press conference, presented the American public with a choice.

Who did they believe in the group-chat controversy? Jeffrey Goldberg, whom she characterised as an “anti-Trump sensationalist reporter", or Pete Hegseth, the Senate-confirmed secretary of defence who “honourably served our nation in uniform”.

That’s the kind of framing that's a red meat appeal to Donald Trump’s base. The administration's strategy for handling this crisis is to trust that Trump’s loyal supporters - and the Republican politicians they help elect - will stick with the president.

Such faith has carried Trump through more formidable situations than this, and White House officials seem to believe that it will do so again.

There are risks to this strategy, however. While the base may keep Trump afloat, Republicans need more than their core supporters to win elections – such as state races later this year and in the 2026 congressional mid-terms.

Undecided middle-of-the-road Americans may look at the details of the text messages and be less willing trust that Hegseth is honestly assessing whether his own actions put national security at risk.

And trust, once eroded, is difficult to win back.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has again denied sending war plans in the Signal chat group.

Speaking to reporters from an air strip in Hawaii, Hegseth says the information in the messages released today "doesn't look like war plans".

"They know it's not war plans", he says, "there's no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information".

His job, Hegseth adds "is to provide updates in real time... that's what I did".

The messages from Hegseth, which were shared by The Atlantic, noted what time F-18 fighter aircraft were scheduled to launch, as well as when strikes would take place and in what time frame "trigger-based" attacks could occur.

• Read more: Three sensitive messages from full Signal chat explained

What have Trump officials previously said about classified information?published at 18:15 Greenwich Mean Time 26 March

18:15 GMT 26 March

Image source, Getty Images

By Jake Horton

Several of the Trump officials apparently included in the Signal chat have previously criticised other people for their handling of classified information.

In June 2023, Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz - who appears to have added the Atlantic journalist to the chat - criticised President Biden’s National Security Adviser, external for sending "top secret emails" to a private account.

In January 2023, US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, who was a Fox News host at the time, criticised Biden as "nefarious, sloppy and dumb" after classified documents were found in his garage.

Talking about the same incident, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: "Any time documents have been removed from their proper setting it's a problem, I don't care who did it."

And earlier this month US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, when posting about government leaks, external, said that "any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such".