The furor over a headline-making group chat consumed Washington for a second day on Tuesday.

President Trump spoke to reporters from the White House about the matter, and it was also the focus of a contentious hearing on Capitol Hill.

The central issue is the revelation that many of the most senior members of the Trump administration used the messaging app Signal to conduct a group chat about a then-imminent U.S. attack on Yemen earlier this month.

The controversy came into the public domain in the first place because a journalist — Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic — was added to the chat, apparently inadvertently. The culprit is said to be a staff member affiliated with national security adviser Mike Waltz.

Goldberg on Monday published some excerpts from the chat. It included criticisms of Europe from Vice President Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and details of the way many members of the group reacted with emojis to express approval of the initial strike against the Houthis.

But Goldberg has so far only offered broad contours of another alleged element of the chat — Hegseth providing specific details of the attack a few hours before it took place.

The fact that such inherently sensitive information was being communicated in such a forum — and in front of a reporter whom no other participant appears to have noticed — has caused a political storm.

Here are how the central players have been affected.

National security adviser Mike Waltz

The former Florida congressman has incurred the most direct embarrassment from the episode.

If he, or someone on his staff, had not mistakenly invited Goldberg to connect on Signal and to join the group chat, presumably the discussion would never have been publicly discovered.

Trump has........

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