President Donald Trump’s top Middle East negotiator was in Russia meeting with President Vladimir Putin the same day he was added to a “shockingly reckless” group chat discussing military strikes.
Steve Witkoff and the other members of the group—including President Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles—also likely used their personal devices for the talks, Politico reported.
Signal, the commercial messaging app they used, can’t be downloaded to official federal devices in most cases, a former White House official told the outlet.
On Monday, The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a bombshell account of how he was inadvertently added to a group chat discussing potential military strikes in Yemen targeting the Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group wreaking havoc on shipping traffic in the Suez Canal.
At first, Goldberg thought it was fake, until Hegseth shared detailed information about targets and weapons that aligned perfectly with a March 15 strike that killed 53 people.
On the same day Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz created the group—Thursday, March 13—Witkoff flew from Doha, Qatar, to Moscow to meet with Putin, The New York Times reported.
In February, Trump tapped his old friend—a billionaire developer with no diplomacy experience who has nevertheless been tasked with brokering between Israel and Hamas—to also be his personal envoy to Putin and to try to help negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, according to the Times.
The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trafimov first noted the timing of his Russia visit on the social media platform X. Witkoff met with Putin “late on March 13” after arriving in Moscow that morning, Trafimov wrote. Reuters confirmed the meeting was set for Thursday night.
Russia has repeatedly tried to compromise communications on Signal, CBS News reported.
According to The Atlantic, on Thursday, Waltz asked the Yemen group chat members to provide points of contact for coordinating the strike. The chat then fell silent until the next morning, when a policy discussion broke out. On Saturday, Hegseth posted operational details about the planned strikes, including targets, weapons and attack sequencing, Goldberg wrote.
Witkoff returned to the U.S. on Saturday after stopping in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Friday, according to flight data reviewed by CBS. Based on Goldberg’s report, he didn’t make any comments in the Yemen chat until Saturday.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
During a previously scheduled U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday, Democrat Sen. Michael Bennet grilled CIA Director John Ratcliffe about the timing of Witkoff’s visit.
“Did you know that the president’s Middle East advisor was in Moscow—on this thread—while you were, as director of the CIA, participating in this thread? Were you aware of that?" he said.
“I’m not aware of that,” Ratcliffe replied.
The former White House official who spoke to Politico said there was no reason Witkoff or any of the other administration officials should have been using unsecured messaging systems or devices.
“These guys all have traveling security details to set up secure comms for them, wherever they are,” the source said. “Their personal phones are all hackable, and it’s highly likely that foreign intelligence services are sitting on their phones watching them type the s--- out.”
Beyond phone hacking concerns, the app isn’t “accredited” for classified data, cybersecurity expert Jacob Williams told Politico, because its data can be stored across multiple devices. Users can link Signal messaging to their desktop applications, which then stores the information on the linked computer.
“That data is then at risk from commodity malware on the system,” Williams said.
Even if a user is careful to only use a secure device, they don’t know where their contacts are using it, he added.
That means that even though Signal is considered one of the most secure messaging protocols available to the public, it’s “far below the standards required for discussing any elements of a war plan,” Mark Montgomery, senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Politico.
