Follow live updates on the Trump administration’s Signal war plans leak.
A Signal leak
By far the biggest story of the day is The Atlantic’s stunning revelation that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, discussed sensitive Yemen bombing plans with other senior Trump administration officials on a messaging app — in a group text that mistakenly included that publication’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
The incident has raised serious questions about whether the group chat violated laws including the Espionage Act and endangered troops. But it’s also reminiscent of how Wall Street firms got into hot water for similar reasons. They had to pay more than $2 billion for doing the kind of off-channel messaging that Hegseth and others are being sharply criticized for now.
“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” Hegseth wrote at one point, referring to operational security, during a group chat on Signal, according to Goldberg. The defense secretary then revealed detailed war plans on the same channel. Goldberg, who had been added by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, said he didn’t include the most sensitive details from the chat in his article.
While Goldberg writes that he was initially unsure whether the whole thing was a joke or a misinformation campaign, the launching of airstrikes on targets in Yemen eventually persuaded him that it was real. (Waltz had responded with emojis to the bombing details: “👊🇺🇸🔥”.)
Goldberg later left the group and confirmed with the White House that the chat was real.
Critics say the group chat violated laws and security protocols. It did not take place on government-vetted secure systems and it may have occurred on government officials’ phones, which have been targets of hacking by foreign adversaries.
Moreover, Waltz had set some of the group’s messages to disappear after one week and some after four weeks. Because they involved discussions about official acts, if they weren’t promptly forwarded to official government accounts for archiving, the participants could have run afoul of federal laws.
Such accusations are similar to those that financial firms faced from regulators, which have imposed big fines for use of “off-channel” messaging services including Signal, WhatsApp and iMessage. More than two dozen institutions — including the trading app Robinhood, the lenders Wells Fargo and BNP Paribas, and others — admitted to violating record-keeping provisions of federal securities laws. (Individual bankers were also fined by their employers.)
The reasons are similar: The S.E.C. and others have pushed banks to keep tabs on their employees’ messages to ensure that no laws are being broken. “Record-keeping failures such as those here undermine our ability to exercise effective regulatory oversight, often at the expense of investors,” Sanjay Wadhwa, then the S.E.C.’s deputy director of enforcement, said in 2023, announcing $289 million in fines against 11 firms.
Will Trump-era regulators police this going forward? Two of the S.E.C.’s current commissioners, Mark Uyeda (who’s now acting chair) and Hester Peirce, have criticized such cases because “it does not appear that firms have an achievable path to compliance.”
Paul Atkins, President Trump’s pick to lead the commission, feels similarly: “I’m not sure that’s the most productive or the best paradigm for an agency to follow,” he said at a Federalist Society panel last April.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
The F.B.I. creates a task force to investigate Tesla attacks. “This is domestic terrorism,” Kash Patel, the agency’s director, wrote on X in announcing the news, promising to bring those responsible for cases of vandalism or arson “to justice.” But an internal intelligence assessment by the Trump administration found that attacks on Tesla properties and vehicles probably weren’t coordinated and warned against conflating legal protests against Mr. Musk with vandalism to Teslas, The Times reports.
Boeing is reportedly seeking to withdraw its federal plea agreement. The embattled plane maker is hoping it can get more favorable treatment from the Justice Department under President Trump, after it pleaded guilty to deceiving the Federal Aviation Administration before two deadly crashes of 737 Max 9 jets, The Wall Street Journal reports. If the department follows suit, it would mark one of the most notable examples of a softer stance on some white-collar crime enforcement.
Samsung Electronics’ co-C.E.O. dies. Han Jong-Hee, who oversaw the Korean conglomerate’s smartphone and consumer businesses and was a nearly four-decade veteran of the company, died earlier on Tuesday of a heart attack, a company spokeswoman said. He was 63. His death adds to the challenges facing Samsung: Its stock has fallen more than 23 percent over the past 12 months amid questions about its A.I. chip-making and its smartphone sales.
What markets are telling us about tariffs
For weeks, the markets have been sending the message that American multinationals will be among the most at risk from President Trump’s trade war.
That seemed apparent when the S&P 500 briefly tumbled into correction territory earlier this month. And it was clear again on Monday when stocks rallied as the White House signaled it could go easy on trading partners when it announces its next round of duties on April 2.
Here’s the latest:
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Trump said on Monday that he “may give a lot of countries breaks,” a sign that the White House is beginning to factor in potential disruptions to global trade from its tariff policy.
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Stocks gained on Monday, with the Magnificent 7 group of tech giants posting their best one-day gain in more than two months as investors cheered the conciliatory signals.
That said, it’s unclear if the Trump administration is putting much stock in the market’s ups and downs as it plots its next move. S&P 500 futures on Tuesday point to modest gains.
Trump has changed tack on trade policy before. Last month, the administration scrapped the so-called de minimis exception, a duty-free provision applied to goods worth up to $800. Days later it was reinstated following upheaval at customs checkpoints, and after logistics companies lobbied for relief. That experience offers a warning of potential chaos, and hopes that the administration may dial back tariff policy if it becomes too disruptive.
“If the elimination of de-minimis trade sowed chaos, how much more could the business cycle be disrupted if the reciprocal tariffs are rushed out before considering the downstream implications for U.S. businesses?” Tim Quinlan, a Wells Fargo economist, wrote in a research note on Monday.
It wasn’t all good news on tariffs on Monday. Trump reiterated that duties on auto and pharmaceutical imports were in the works. And he threatened 25 percent tariffs on any country that bought energy from Venezuela as he increased pressure on the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Those tensions put Chevron, which has a big presence in the South American country, under the gun.
And bonds sold off, with the yield on a 10-year Treasury note, which underpins mortgage and credit card lending rates, rising to a one-month high. Inflation and growth concerns are weighing on bond holders.
Raphael Bostic, the Atlanta Fed president, now sees the central bank cutting borrowing costs just once this year with inflation hovering well above the Fed’s 2 percent target. He added that the lack of clarity on White House policy was muddling internal Fed forecasts.
Businesses have told the White House something similar, The Times’s Ana Swanson reports.
Their message to Trump officials: Remove trade-war measures; don’t increase them.
More bad news for deal makers
Coming into this year, deal makers were anticipating a big rebound in M.&A. and I.P.O.s.
With CoreWeave expected to price this week, there’s still high hope for the latter. But deal flow is looking sluggish.
A look at the numbers: New research by Mergermarket, a data provider, shows that 6,955 tie-ups were announced globally this quarter, the lowest quarterly tally since 2005. Yet deal flow has roughly halved since the first quarter of 2021.
On a more positive note: The aggregate value of those deals was roughly $827 billion in the first quarter — a 15 percent increase from a year earlier.
Zooming into the United States, however, shows that deal value has sunk slightly, hurt by a dearth of megadeals. There has been a slight uptick in recent weeks — Google’s $32 billion bid for Wiz, the cybersecurity start-up, is the search giant’s biggest ever — but the underlying trend doesn’t look especially promising.
“While boardrooms digest the impact of tariffs and trade barriers on their businesses, dealmaking momentum has been hampered by uncertainty,” Lucinda Guthrie, Head of Mergermarket, said in a company release. “There is significant pressure for private equity firms to exit portfolio companies, especially in non-cyclical industries, and for companies to find scale and adapt to the evolving business environment.”
Where does a bankrupt 23andMe’s data go?
With 23andMe filing for bankruptcy on Monday, questions are swirling about what will become of the data held by the genetic testing company.
The trove is vast, consisting of data on 14 million customers’ ancestry, plus family traits and potential health risks.
Warnings are coming in, highlighting the potential data vulnerability. On Friday, Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, issued a stark alert reminding constituents of their right to “delete their data and destroy any samples of genetic material held by the company.”
Geoffrey Fowler, a Washington Post tech columnist, offered a similar take. “Delete your DNA from 23andMe right now,” blared the headline in his latest column. He noted that he had spoken with privacy experts who expressed concerns about whether the company could adequately safeguard data from hackers while under bankruptcy.
In 2023, the company had a data breach that targeted Jewish and Chinese customers, according to a class-action lawsuit.
The company is continuing operations, including processing orders for test kits. But it said “any buyer will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data.”
Customers ran into issues on Monday. Amid a rush to delete their data, many customers received error messages or reported long customer-service wait times, The Wall Street Journal reported.
It has been a whirlwind for the company. After 23andMe went public in 2021, its market value briefly topped $6 billion — but it struggled to get repeat customers.
Last year, the seven independent directors of the board sent an open resignation letter to Anne Wojcicki, the C.E.O and founder, informing her of their frustration with the company’s direction.
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