President Trump’s nominee to become the highest-ranking military officer said Tuesday that if had he been part of an unclassified text chain about imminent U.S. airstrikes he would have halted it.
The comments by retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, President Trump’s nominee to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, marked a divergence with Trump administration officials, who have defended a chat on the Signal app that they conducted about March 15 attacks inside Yemen, saying it included no classified information.
“I think I would weigh in and stop it if I was a part of it, but in this case I wasn’t,” Caine said at his Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing in response to questions about how he would have responded to tactical information shared on an unclassified chat system.
Caine described the text thread, which the White House has called a “serious policy discussion,” as a “partisan political chat.” It was important to communicate military planning details securely, in part, to “preserve the element of surprise,” he added.
National security adviser Mike Waltz, who created the chat group, added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat, apparently inadvertently, and the magazine subsequently shared details from the chat. Normally, such chats happen over secure government communications channels or in facilities designed for sharing classified information, like the Situation Room at the White House.
Trump nominated Caine last month to be chairman after firing Air Force Gen. CQ Brown without explanation. Caine is a retired three-star Air Force general, who would need a waiver to be confirmed by the Senate because he hasn’t held one of the previous senior jobs required by law before becoming chairman.
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