FBI Director Kash Patel, left, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, center, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, right, testify Wednesday, March 26, 2025, at a House Intelligence Committee hearing about the Signal chat scandal. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)

House Democrats on Wednesday called for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s resignation for including specific weapons and the timing of using them in a commercial group chat with other top U.S. officials ahead of a surprise attack on Houthi militants.

Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., and at least three other lawmakers demanded during a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing that Hegseth quit. The hearing came just hours after The Atlantic magazine published the full text of the pre-strike Signal chat that included President Donald Trump’s top national security officials in which the publication’s top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally invited. The Atlantic initially excluded the specific details of a chain of messages that Hegseth shared in the chat in the hours leading up to the strikes against the Iran-back terrorist group, but the publication released the full text Wednesday after Trump officials repeatedly denied Hegseth’s texts included classified information or wrongdoing.

“It is outrageous, and it is a leadership failure, and that’s why Secretary Hegseth, who undoubtedly transmitted classified, sensitive operational information via this chain, must resign immediately,” said Crow, a former Army officer who served in Afghanistan with the elite 75th Ranger Regiment. “There can be no fixes, there can be no corrections until there is accountability.”

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., said she would have “walked my resignation in immediately,” if she had been involved in a similar situation when she was an Air Force officer.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who were among the participants in the chat over the Signal messaging app, both stood by their testimony from a day earlier before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee when they testified the chat included no classified details.

Both said Wednesday that they were unaware of how Goldberg was added to the chat and confirmed the National Security Council was investigating. Gabbard admitted the chain included “candid and sensitive information” and the journalist’s inclusion in the chat “was a mistake.”

But they both defended the use of Signal, a publicly available encrypted text messaging application, as appropriate though the Defense Department had previously warned employees that it could be hacked.

“Ideally, these conversations occur in person,” said Gabbard, who was traveling in Asia at the time of the chat. “However, at times, fast moving coordination of an unclassified nature is necessary where in-person conversation is not an option.”

The new details shared Wednesday by The Atlantic showed Hegseth revealed F-18 fighter jets, MQ-9 Reaper drones and sea-based Tomahawk missiles would strike Houthi targets. His texts included approximate times that the jets and drones would reach the “target terrorist” and fire their weapons. It did not name the individual who was targeted or include information about the units conducting the strikes or from what location they were flying.

Gabbard insisted the lack of such detail kept the chat unclassified. Further, as defense secretary, Hegseth can decide what information should be shielded from public release, she said. Defense Department guidelines generally call for information to be classified if its “disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause describable damage to national security.” The military typically keeps operational details about strikes and other military missions such as weapons systems, specific timing and units classified to protect the sanctity of the mission and the troops carrying it out, Houlihan said.

“This is not OK. Communicating these sorts of things in Signal is not OK,” she said. “Targets, times, those kinds of things are absolutely classified, and we all know it. I know it.”

Hegseth has said little about the issue. In remarks in Hawaii on Tuesday during his first Indo-Pacific trip as defense secretary, he denied wrongdoing and said he did not text “war plans.”

“I know exactly what I’m doing, exactly what we’re directing, and I’m really proud of what we accomplished, the successful missions that night and going forward,” Hegseth told reporters.

Republican members of the intelligence committee largely on Wednesday defended the Trump administration’s handling of the situation and blasted Democrats for focusing on the issue.

But Democrats warned using an application such as Signal could have opened the information to adversaries such as Russia or China, both of which have proven hacking programs.

“Everyone here knows that the Russians or the Chinese could have gotten all of that information, and they could have passed it on to the Houthis, who easily could have repositioned weapons and altered their plans to knock down planes or sink ships,” said Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the committee. “I think that it’s by the awesome grace of God that we are not mourning dead pilots right now.”

The Houthis have capable anti-aircraft systems and have shot down U.S. Reaper drones in the past, officials have said.

The Atlantic, in its stories, said those capabilities were among the reasons that it held the story until this week about the initial wave of strikes against the Houthis on March 15.

Democrats have commended the publication for taking such precautions, while Republicans, including Trump and Hegseth, have attacked Goldberg.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said he knows from his nine years on the intelligence committee that the information shared by Hegseth should have been classified and only revealed in closely guarded government communication channels. He lambasted Gabbard and Ratcliffe – both former members of the House – for continuing to defend the chat as unclassified.

“The idea that this information, if it was presented to [this] committee, would not be classified – y’all know is a lie,” he said. “That’s ridiculous. I’ve seen things much less sensitive be presented to us with high classification, and to say that it isn’t is a lie to the country.”