Trump's Cabinet call Europe 'pathetic freeloaders' in bombshell leaked texts as journalist accidentally added to chat
25 March 2025, 07:25 | Updated: 25 March 2025, 12:14
Donald Trump's closest aides called European countries "pathetic" and slammed them as "freeloaders" in bombshell leaked texts revealed when a journalist was accidentally added to a group chat.
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The US president’s national security team, including vice-president JD Vance, defense secretary Peter Hegseth, Marco Rubio and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard used the group chat to discuss top secret plans for airstrikes on Yemen.
National Security Adviser Mike Waltz started the chat on Signal, a commercial encrypted messaging app, accidentally adding a journalist who saw their secret plans.
Regardless of its encryption, the app is not an approved form of communicating sensitive information by the US government.
Vance addressed a message to Hegseth, saying: ‘if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again."
“The user identified as Hegseth responded three minutes later: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this.
“Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”
The US is not the only nation protecting the shipping lanes in the Red Sea, however, as a task force of more than 20 countries including Britain are involved in the operation targeting the Houthis.
Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief at The Atlantic who was added to the chat, revealed the baffling incident on Monday, saying he found out that the US would start bombing the Houthis in Yemen two hours before they actually did, on March 15.
Goldberg said the messages in the chat, named ‘Houthi PC Small Group’ included “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”
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He said that “Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 am” The US began bombing Yemen around 2 pm the same day.
“It should go without saying—but I'll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app,” he wrote in The Atlantic.
Trump told reporters at the White House that he hadn't seen The Atlantic story: “I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of the Atlantic. It's to me, it's a magazine that's going out of business.
Pressed about the leak, he said: “It couldn't have been very effective, because the attack was very effective. I can tell you that I don't know anything about it. You're telling me about it for the first time.”
The security breach is likely to put the Trump administration under further pressure about their handling of classified information and intelligence. At one point, Hegseth gloats about guaranteeing ‘100% OPSEC - operations security’, while a well-known journalist reads on.
The blunder has been described by pundits across the US as unprecedented.
The group message chain included a number of messages denigrating Europe, which, according to the Trump administration, benefits economically from the US Navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.
The group chat was confirmed as being authentic by Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
He told The Atlantic: “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.
“The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”
Goldberg said he voluntarily left the thread, and also stopped short of revealing the contents of some of the messages as they could come to the advantage of enemies of the US.
