WATCH: White House says no classified material was shared in leaked group chat

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated that there was no classified information in a thread on the commercial messaging app Signal where top administration officials – including the vice president, defense secretary and national security adviser – discussed plans and operational details for military strikes in Yemen.

The thread also mistakenly included a journalist – Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and moderator of Washington Week with The Atlantic. On Wednesday, Goldberg and his colleagues followed up his initial reporting on the thread by publishing the entire Signal thread, which included timings of “strike windows” and other details of an attack against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels earlier this month. While Signal uses end-to-end encryption to prevent any third-parties from snooping on communication in the app, hackers could still gain access to individual devices where the messages are read.

“I would characterize this messaging thread as a policy discussion, a sensitive policy discussion surely, amongst high-level Cabinet officials and senior staff,” Leavitt said Wednesday during a White House news briefing where she was asked about the leaked group chat.

Her comments followed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard telling a House committee earlier Wednesday that the addition of Goldberg to the Signal chat thread “was a mistake.”

Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., told reporters at the Capitol on Wednesday that “the information as published recently appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature that, based on my knowledge, I would have wanted it classified.”

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