In downplaying the gravity of disclosing details about an imminent U.S. military operation to participants in a Signal group chat that included an accidentally invited journalist, President Donald Trump and his underlings have insisted the information was not classified. "You all know that's a lie," Rep. Joaquin Castro (D–Texas) told CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, at a hearing on Wednesday. "It's a lie to the country."
Or is it? It was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who divulged information about the impending air strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. The New York Times notes that "the president and the secretary of defense have the ability to assert, even retroactively, that information is declassified." When a similar issue came up in connection with the government records that Trump kept after leaving the White House in 2021, he said the president—and presumably the defense secretary too—can declassify stuff just "by thinking about it."
That argument was a red herring because the main statute Trump was accused of violating, 18 USC 793, covers information "relating to the national defense," regardless of whether it is officially classified. And since that law encompasses "gross negligence" as well as willful dissemination of national defense information, Hegseth arguably violated it by using a forum that was manifestly insecure to discuss the timing and nature of the March 15 operation in Yemen before it happened.
