WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s top intelligence officials are facing Congress this week to offer their first testimony in office about the threats confronting the United States and tackle urgent questions about the security breach that unfolded when war plans were mistakenly leaked to a journalist.
In the first, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia denounced what he called a pattern of “careless, incompetent behavior” by the Trump administration with regard to the handling of sensitive information.
“Putting aside for a moment that classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system, it’s also just mind-boggling” that no one thought to check the participants on the group chat, said Warner, the panel’s top Democrat.
FBI Director Kash Patel, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard are among the witnesses appearing Tuesday before the Senate panel and again Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee.
Tuesday’s hearing is taking place one day after news broke that several top national security officials in the Republican administration, including Ratcliffe, Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, texted war plans for military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic.
The text chain “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Goldberg reported. The strikes began two hours after Goldberg received the details.
“Horrified” by the leak of what is historically strictly guarded information, the top Democrat on the House intelligence panel, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, said he will be demanding answers in Wednesday’s hearing.
The annual hearings on worldwide threats will offer a glimpse of the Trump administration’s reorienting of priorities, which officials across agencies have described as countering the scourge of fentanyl and fighting violent crime, human trafficking and illegal immigration.
Former FBI Director Christopher Wray routinely has said he is hard-pressed to think of a time in his career when the United States faced so many elevated threats at once, but the concerns he more regularly highlighted had to do with sophisticated Chinese espionage plots, ransomware attacks that have crippled hospitals and international and domestic terrorism.
“We have to change to the dynamic threat landscape that is changing constantly not just in America but abroad,” Patel said in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday night, citing the elevated threat from “narco-traffickers.” But, he added, “we’re not going to forget or ignore national security — never.”
The hearings are also unfolding against the backdrop of a starkly different approach toward Russia following years of Biden administration sanctions over its war against Ukraine.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed during a lengthy call with President Donald Trump to an immediate pause in strikes against energy infrastructure in what the White House described as the first step in a “movement to peace.”
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