“I make a lot of mistakes in my life, and I’ve found that it’s best when I just own up to them and say, ‘I’m human,’” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I made a mistake.”

To his credit, Wicker, along with his Democratic counterpart on the committee, wrote a letter to the Pentagon’s inspector general requesting an expedited review of the circumstances that led to a major security breach wherein the editor in chief of the Atlantic was added to a Signal group chat consisting primarily of members of the National Security Council and various deputies shortly before the secretary of defense outlined plans for an imminent military strike. (It’s important to keep reiterating these facts to keep from losing sight of how shocking and ridiculous the situation is.) But Wicker’s chastened response separates him from other Republicans, who are taking a different approach—or several different approaches—to managing the Houthi strike OPSEC disaster.

“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,’” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt crowed, drawing attention to the Atlantic’s use of “attack plans” in their headline. “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

“Those are some really shitty war plans,” added Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “This only proves one thing: Jeff Goldberg has never seen a war plan or an ‘attack plan’ (as he now calls it). Not even close.”

This is an odd angle to take, not because it’s out of character—Donald Trump’s inner circle regularly employs dishonest smear campaigns to avoid acknowledgement of any wrongdoing—but because Leavitt and Hegseth are essentially arguing that the plans were simultaneously too specific and too unspecific to qualify as “war plans”: Leavitt seems to be claiming that they’re too focused to qualify as a roadmap to a full-scale war, While Hegseth maintains that they’re too general to be “war plans” in the sense of a detailed account of all aspects of an operation. Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t so sure about the distinction between “attack plans” and “war plans,” but in any case, they don’t see the nomenclature as the most important aspect of the story.

“I saw the text that came out,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-Idaho). “I just don’t think it was appropriate that that was in there—in the conversation—that was not in a classified position.”

“I’d have to go back and look at it,” Rounds added. “I don’t know if there is or not, I just know that information that was provided there should not have been discussed on that platform.”