The nation’s top two spy chiefs who participated in a Signal chat discussing U.S. strikes in Yemen rejected assertions that detailed military information on planned and completed strikes was classified intelligence under questioning from Democratic senators on Tuesday.
But even as the two officials, C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, acknowledged the sensitivity of information about strike targets, they sought to evade specifics on the content of the chat, offered carefully parsed answers on responsibility for the leaks and declined to release the details of the exchanges.
Ms. Gabbard initially declined to confirm that she was even added to the chat. And Mr. Ratcliffe, who said it was up to the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to determine what information could be shared in an unclassified chat, flatly rejected the conclusion of one Democratic senator who asked him to agree that the entire episode had been a serious and damaging mistake.
It took the intelligence chiefs several rounds of questions from lawmakers about the Signal chat, detailed Monday in The Atlantic, to describe their view of events. But the picture that emerged from two hours of testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee — a previously scheduled hearing that was supposed to be about the array of threats against America — was the spy chiefs’ contention that no sensitive information from their areas of responsibility was shared.
Instead, Mr. Hegseth is under the microscope for his decision to put sensitive defense information, most likely classified, into the chat.
Signal, a widely available messaging platform, uses a powerful form of encryption. But it does not have the security protections of classified government computers.