Taylor Swift came up in a US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, after the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic was allegedly accidentally added to a Signal group chat of national security officials discussing a bombing campaign in Yemen earlier this week.
The journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, remained in the group undetected as the cabinet members discussed policy and the potential wave of bombings, which critics said put national security at risk and has sparked both backlash and ridicule.
Democratic Virginia Senator Mark Warner was explaining the dangers of alienating allies to the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and FBI Director Kash Patel and pointed to Swift’s shows in Vienna last year becoming the target of a terror plot. He pointed out that sharing intel ended up saving lives.
Swift cancelled the three ‘Eras’ shows after police announced that they had narrowly foiled an ISIS plot to attack one of Swift’s shows in the country.
“That sharing of information saves lives, and it’s not hypothetical — we all remember, because it was declassified — last year when Austria worked with our community to make sure to expose a plot against Taylor Swift in Vienna that could have killed literally hundreds of individuals,” he said.
At the time, Swift spoke out about the scrapped shows, saying: “Having our Vienna shows cancelled was devastating. The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows. But I was also so grateful to the authorities because thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives.”
In other news, SZA recently revealed Taylor Swift “was open” to writing something together.
Swift, meanwhile, was recently honoured at the iHeartRadio Music Awards 2025, taking home the prize for Tour Of The Century. The career-spanning mammoth run of 149 shows took place across 21 months, and by the tour’s midpoint, she had already made history when it became the first tour to gross $1billion (£796million).