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The secretary of defense and top intelligence officials in the Trump administration discussed ongoing military operations in Yemen on the widely available app Signal. The chat was made public because the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added accidentally to the group thread. But this news lands a little bit differently with veterans and active duty troops. NPR's Quil Lawrence reports.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Two members of the president's cabinet who were on that Signal chat came back to Capitol Hill today for scheduled hearings - CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Here she is getting grilled about the Signal chat by Pennsylvania Democrat Chrissy Houlahan.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHRISSY HOULAHAN: You're a former battalion commander in the Army. Would this seem to qualify to you as something worthy of that investigation?
TULSI GABBARD: Thank you for your question, Congresswoman. In this situation, Secretary Hegseth has the...
HOULAHAN: Yes or no?
GABBARD: ...Classification and declassification...
LAWRENCE: Houlahan is a former Air Force officer, and Gabbard is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. As such, they likely both know what happens when active duty personnel compromise sensitive information, which is called spillage.
KEVIN CARROLL: What typically happens in a spillage as serious as this is they're immediately fired. They're processed for being kicked out of the military, and they're referred for criminal prosecution.
LAWRENCE: Kevin Carroll served 30 years in the Army and in the CIA and at Homeland Security in the first Trump administration. As a lawyer, he's defended troops who accidentally leaked information, though nothing anywhere near spilling a planned airstrike in Yemen in advance to a reporter in an unsecured chat group.
CARROLL: I've defended spillage cases where people were going to be put out of the military or people were going to be turned out of their job within the military for violations that are just the smallest fraction of what just occurred.
LAWRENCE: Military officers who've sent even old battlefield assessments, he says, have immediately lost their jobs. And he says that watching leadership spill potentially deadly information and so far suffer no consequences is demoralizing for troops. But that gap is sadly common enough that there's a phrase for it in the military - different spanks for different ranks.
CARROLL: You used the phrase I was going to use - different spanks for different ranks. It's terrible for morale because the GIs know that they would absolutely be crucified for this kind of activity and that nothing is going to happen to the secretary of defense.
LAWRENCE: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said again today that he did nothing wrong.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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