Vice President JD Vance found himself at the center of internet mockery after a late-night text message surfaced from a compromised Signal chat involving some of the nation’s most powerful figures. The message, sent at 2:26 a.m. on March 25, 2025, read: “This chat’s kind of dead. Anything going on?” No one responded.
The embarrassing text came to light when the Defense Department’s Inspector General released an 84-page report on Thursday, December 4, 2025, detailing an extraordinary security breach. The report revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had violated department protocols by using the messaging app Signal to share sensitive information about U.S. military operations in Yemen—and had accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to the group chat.
The scandal, dubbed “Signalgate,” began on March 11, 2025, when National Security Advisor Michael Waltz created a Signal group chat titled “Houthi PC Small Group” for coordinating U.S. military strikes against Houthi forces in Yemen. As Waltz assembled the chat, which would eventually include 19 high-ranking officials, he inadvertently sent a Signal request to Goldberg and added him to the conversation on March 13.
The chat’s members included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, among others.
On March 15, 2025, at 11:44 p.m. Eastern Time—just before Operation Rough Rider, the largest U.S. military operation in the Middle East during Trump’s presidency—Hegseth shared detailed information about the Yemen strikes in the Signal chat. According to the Inspector General’s report, Hegseth sent “sensitive, nonpublic, operational information” including specifics about weapon packages, targets, strike times, and the quantity of manned U.S. aircraft involved. The information Hegseth received from the head of U.S. Central Command had been marked “SECRET//NOFORN,” indicating it was classified and not to be shared with foreign nationals.
The breach became public knowledge on March 24, 2025, when Goldberg published an article in The Atlantic revealing that he had been inadvertently included in the high-level group chat and had witnessed discussions about the military operation in real time. The article included details about the strikes that Goldberg had observed through the compromised chat, raising immediate questions about national security protocols.
Hours after Goldberg’s bombshell article went public, Vance returned to the compromised Signal chat at 2:26 a.m. on March 25 with his now-infamous message. The vice president’s attempt to joke about or make light of the situation fell flat—according to a screenshot of the chat taken on March 27, no one responded to his message.
Instead, other officials in the chat immediately began covering their tracks. The partial transcript included in the Inspector General’s report shows that after Vance’s message, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent changed the chat settings to make messages disappear after eight hours. A user identified as “MAR” changed their profile name to “MR,” then later to “SR.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe changed his profile to simply “John.” Another user, “S M,” changed their profile name to “SM 76.”
On March 26, two days after his initial report, Goldberg and Washington Post journalist Shane Harris published a second article in The Atlantic containing the full transcript of the Signal chat exchanges during the March 15 attack on the Houthis. The publication omitted only the name of a CIA operative at the agency’s request. The transcript revealed specific timing of planned military strikes and real-time reports on their deployment, definitively proving that sensitive operational details had been discussed on an unsecured platform.
The Defense Department’s Inspector General investigation, launched on April 3, 2025, following a request from the Senate Committee on Armed Services, concluded that Hegseth had violated departmental policies and endangered American lives. “Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives,” the report stated.
The investigation found that Hegseth overwhelmingly declined to cooperate with the inquiry, refusing to hand over the personal phone he used to make war plans over Signal and declining to sit for an interview with investigators. Despite Hegseth’s lack of cooperation, the report concluded that his actions had put U.S. troops at risk.
In a written statement submitted to the Inspector General in July 2025, Hegseth defended his actions, asserting that he alone had the authority to determine whether information should be classified or whether classified materials no longer needed protection and could therefore be declassified. He explained that on Mar. 15, 2025, he took broad, non-specific information that he concluded, at his sole discretion, was either not classified or could be safely declassified, and then entered those details into the Signal chat.
The irony of the security breach was not lost on observers, who noted that several members of the compromised chat had previously taken strong public stances on protecting classified information. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had stated on March 14, 2025—just one day before Hegseth shared the Yemen strike information: “Any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe had stated in 2019: “Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the Espionage Act.”
The incident gained widespread attention when the Inspector General’s report was released on December 4, containing the partial transcript that included Vance’s awkward 2:26 a.m. message. Social media users immediately seized on the vice president’s text, with many suggesting that other officials had created a new group chat without him, leaving him messaging an abandoned conversation. The implication that Vance had been left out struck a chord with internet users who found the situation both concerning and darkly humorous.
The viral spread of Vance’s message overshadowed the more serious security implications of the breach. Critics pointed out that while Vance was making jokes in the compromised chat, other officials were scrambling to obscure their digital footprints and minimize potential damage. The Inspector General’s report noted that crucial messages had been auto-deleted before officials could preserve them for the investigation, suggesting that the disappearing message feature had been enabled early in the chat’s existence or activated by members seeking to cover their tracks.
The scandal also raised questions about whether additional compromised communications might exist. On April 20, 2025, The New York Times reported that Hegseth had initiated another Signal group chat titled “Defense | Team Huddle” that reportedly contained information about the timing of airstrikes. This chat allegedly included Hegseth’s brother, his wife, and about a dozen other people, further expanding the circle of individuals with potential access to sensitive military information.
Adding to the severity of the breach, German magazine Der Spiegel reported on March 26, 2025, that they were able to find private contact details and passwords for members of the group chat, including Gabbard, Hegseth, and Waltz, on the internet. This revelation suggested that the security vulnerabilities extended beyond the Signal chat itself to encompass the personal digital security practices of senior administration officials.
The timing of Vance’s message—sent in the early morning hours just after the scandal became public—added to the perception of someone either attempting humor at an inappropriate moment or genuinely unaware that the chat’s security had been catastrophically compromised. The lack of any response to his message in a chat that had previously been active with discussions of military operations underscored the gravity of the situation and suggested that other members recognized the need for damage control rather than casual conversation.
The Inspector General’s report, Vance’s ill-timed message, and the subsequent cover-up attempts by other officials combined to create a narrative that many critics characterized as evidence of a “deeply unserious” approach to national security. The scandal raised fundamental questions about whether officials who had compromised sensitive military information through careless communication practices could be trusted to protect America’s national security interests going forward.