A senior White House official accidentally leaked details of plans to send an elite army unit to Portland, in the latest intelligence leak by the Trump administration.
Anthony Salisbury, a top deputy to Stephen Miller, the influential White House policy adviser, was observed using Signal in a public place to discuss a plan to deploy the army’s 82nd airborne division to Portland, the Democratic-run Oregon city which Donald Trump has repeatedly castigated as being “war-ravaged”.
The Minnesota Star Tribune obtained images of Salisbury’s Signal messages, which it said were sent while the official was “in clear view of others” in Minnesota.
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In the messages, sent last weekend, Salisbury chatted with Patrick Weaver, a senior adviser to the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and other high-ranking federal officials, the Star Tribune reported.
Weaver wrote that Hegseth wanted Trump to expressly tell him to send troops to Portland.
“Between you and I, I think Pete just wants the top cover from the boss if anything goes sideways with the troops there,” Weaver said. He wrote that Hegseth would prefer to send in the national guard due to potential backlash over using the army.
“82nd is like our top tier [quick reaction force] for abroad. So it will cause a lot of headlines,” he added. “Probably why he wants potus [Trump] to tell him to do it.”
The 82nd airborne division is an elite unit which specialises in parachute assaults and forcible entry operations. It was deployed in both world wars and the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Its commander was the last American soldier to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2021.
On Sunday, Hegseth said 200 members of the national guard would be deployed “immediately”. On Wednesday, Trump claimed the national guard was “now in place”; however, NBC News affiliate KGW reported that the guard had not yet been deployed.
Salisbury was appointed deputy homeland security adviser by Trump in January. Announcing his appointment, Trump said Salisbury “will bring his vast law enforcement, counter-narcotics and counter-cartel experience to the White House”.
In a statement to the Minnesota Star Tribune, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, confirmed Salisbury had been in Minnesota to attend a funeral.
“Despite dealing with grief from the loss of a family member, Tony continued his important work on behalf of the American people,” Jackson told the Star Tribune. “Nothing in these private conversations, that are shamefully being reported on by morally bankrupt reporters, is new or classified information.”
The messages are the latest embarrassing leak by the Trump administration. In March, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic was accidentally added to a Signal chat that was being used by senior Trump administration officials, including Hegseth and the vice-president, JD Vance, to discuss highly sensitive military strikes on Yemen.
A month later it emerged that Hegseth had used a second Signal group chat to send detailed information about the strikes to his wife, his brother and about a dozen other people.
