The Trump administration faces scrutiny on the use of the application signal commercially available to discuss plans for an American military attack against Hutis rebels in Yemen, but did anyone violate the law?
Inadvertently, Jeffrey Goldberg was included in the chain, which reported how information about weapons packages, the objectives and the time before the strike was developed.
Goldberg’s report He quickly caused questions about the management of confidential defense information administration, even if the chat violated the espionage law.
The law of 1917 “is the main legal vehicle through which the Government generally brings criminal proceedings due to poor management or classified information leaks,” said National Security Lawyer Bradley Moss.
Signed by law by President Woodrow Wilson shortly after the United States entered World War I, the Espionage Law was aimed at taking energetic measures against unfair war activities.
Despite his title, Moss said that “most of the statute has nothing to do with real espionage and, on the other hand, criminalizes unauthorized storage, dissemination or modification of national defense information.”
President Donald Trump was accused under the espionage law for allegedly mismanagement of classified materials after his first mandate, the accusations denied Trump denied. The case was withdrawn after the 2024 elections, and the special advisor citing the policy of the Department of Justice of Long Data so as not to process the presidents sitting.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz talks to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when President Donald Trump meets with French president Emmanuel Macron at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on February 24, 2025.
Ludovic Marin/AFP through Getty Images
The statute was also used in high profile cases against the filter of the Pentagon Jack Teixeira, who was sentenced last year to 15 years in prison for exposing the defense information, and Chelsea Manning, who was imprisoned for the unauthorized release of hundreds of thousands of government documents classified to Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
Democrats have requested an investigation into the use of the chat of the signal group to discuss a military operation and that some officials involved are fired or renounced.
The White House and the senior officials have tried to minimize the incident, declaring in its defense that there was no classified material involved in the message chain.
“This was not classified. Now, if information is classified, it is probably a bit different,” Trump said while beaten with questions about the matter during a meeting with some of his ambassadors on Tuesday afternoon.
The exact content of the messages is not clear. The administration denies that they include “war plans”, although Goldberg said that it included operational details of strikes in Yemen, including information on objectives and attack sequencing. The National Security Council spokesman, in a statement to ABC News on Monday, said that the thread of the message that was reported “seems to be authentic.”
However, the espionage law is prior to the modern classification system.
“In this context, the information related to the national defense also has to be information that the holder has a reason to believe that it could be used to the injury of the United States or in the advantage of any foreign nation,” said Sam Lebovic, a historian of American politics who has studied the centenary statute.
“And if, as it has been alleged, the operational details were in that information, I think it could argue that it would be information that could be used to the US injury or to the advantage of a foreign nation. And technically, if it is classified or not, it is not related to that definition,” said Lebovic.
President Donald Trump meets American ambassadors in the White House Cabinet Room in Washington, on March 25, 2025.
Mandel and/AFP
Even so, the expansive nature of the Espionage Law, which Lebovic said that any dissemination of information related to national defense to someone not authorized to receive it could essentially covered, it has turned out that it is used relatively rarely other than in the most atrocious cases.
“They are often not prosecuted because the law is so widely written that it gives prosecutors a great discretion to decide when to present charges and when not to do it,” Lebovic said.
The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, was interrogated by Democratic Senator Mark Warner on Tuesday at an audience of the Senate Intelligence Committee on whether his office would investigate the incident. Patel said he had just received information on the matter on Monday night and Tuesday morning and did not have an update. Warner asked one at the end of the day.
The officials of the White House National Security Council said that “they are reviewing” how a journalist was added to the chat of the signal, although the scope of the review, including if he would try to determine why the high -level discussions on military planning were carried out outside the official channels, was not immediately clear.
