'Saturday Night Live' enters the Signal chat
NBC
- "SNL" took on the White House Signal scandal in its latest episode.
- The show's cold open featured Trump officials accidentally sharing military information with high schoolers.
- It follows The Atlantic's bombshell reports on the Signal security breach this week.
The latest episode of "Saturday Night Live" saw the cast take on the Signal texting scandal.
In a spoof of the security leak, Oscar winner Mikey Madison and "SNL" regulars Sarah Sherman and Ego Nwodim played a trio of high schoolers chatting over text who discover that they've been accidentally added to a group chat with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Interrupting their conversation about cute boys and bad outfits, Hegseth, played by Andrew Dismukes, sends: "FYI: Green light on Yemen raid. Tomahawks airborne 15 minutes ago."
"Do we know you, bro? This is Jennabel," Madison's character replies. Nwodim adds: "Hey, I think you have the wrong group chat."
"LOL LOL. Could you imagine if that actually happened?" Dismukes' Hegseth responds. "Homer disappears into bush GIF. And while I've got everyone, sending a PDF with updated locations of all our nuclear submarines. Check out that one we got chilling right outside Shanghai. Jordan Peele sweating like crazy GIF."
As the teenagers continue to plead with Dismukes' Hegseth to stop sending messages, JD Vance (played by Bowen Yang), then joins the chat.
"Nice job with the strike, fam. Female skier emoji," Yang's Vance writes. "My bad, meant to send fire emoji."
Mimicking Vance's recent visit to Greenland — during which the vice president hit out at Denmark and repeated calls for the US to take control of the island — Yang adds: "Nobody knows why I'm here, especially me."
The spoof also features brief cameos from Marcello Hernández as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Mikey Day as Jeffrey Goldberg — the editor of The Atlantic who was mistakenly added to the real-life Signal group by Michael Waltz, President Donald Trump's national security adviser.
"Wait, who are the other three numbers here? P.S. sending you the real JFK files, not those fake ones we released. Do not share!" Hernández's Rubio writes, prompting Nwodim's character to explain that they're high schoolers.
"In that case, we were totally pranking you guys, LOL," he replies, while also asking them to send their names and home addresses to an ICE email address.
"Hey, could be worse. We could have added the editor of The Atlantic again," Yang's Vance reasons.
"You did!" Day's Goldberg says.
Goldberg published a bombshell report about the incident in The Atlantic on Monday, detailing how he had been mistakenly added to a chat called the "Houthi PC small group" along with senior Trump administration officials discussing upcoming military strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
As scrutiny of the apparent security breach mounted, Trump's team attempted to downplay the significance of the incident and denied that classified material had been shared in the group.
In response, The Atlantic published a follow-up article detailing messages from Hegseth about the timings and targets of airstrikes.
The leak has drawn alarm from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers.