Attorney General Pam Bondi all but dismissed a criminal probe into the leak of a high-level government Signal chat—and insisted that rather than being a national security risk the app is actually “a very safe way to communicate.”
In an appearance Thursday on Fox News show The Ingraham Angle, Bondi was pressed by host Laura Ingraham on a potential investigation into how the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added to the “Houthi PC small group” on the Signal messaging app—a chat that contained sensitive details about the administration’s secret plans to strike targets in Yemen.
Members of the group included the likes of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
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“So this is not a concern of yours?” Ingraham began. “You are completely confident that this was a mistake and nothing more than that?”
President Donald Trump’s top legal enforcer said the administration and “all of our intelligence officials who were on it are confident” Goldberg was added to the Signal group chat by mistake.
Ingraham said she knew that some Democrats at the “highest level” also used the app. “Is that changing in the government now?” Ingraham asked. “Is Signal not going to be used, or is it going to be used going forward?”
“I think Signal is a very safe way to communicate,” said Fox News regular Bondi. “I don’t think foreign adversaries are able to hack Signal as far as I know.”
She suggested in a separate news conference on Thursday that there likely won’t be an investigation into the incident, and echoed talking points from the Trump administration that the messages did not contain classified information.
Defense sources have argued that the information was in fact classified at the time the messages were written because the operation had not yet started, while Goldberg said in an article on Wednesday with co-author Shane Harris that if the texts had been received by someone “hostile”, then “the consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.”
The Trump administration has denied that the messages contained classified information. Hegseth has also rejected suggestions that “war plans” were shared in the group chat.
The president rushed to Waltz’s defense following the mishap, telling NBC News on Tuesday that his national security adviser “learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.”
On Thursday, a federal judge ordered that the Trump administration officials preserve all the messages that were sent in the Signal group chat from March 11 to 15.
