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The defense of the United States is a serious business. Breaches of national security are especially dangerous. So perhaps I should not have laughed at the reactions of Donald Trump and his staff and Cabinet members to the revelations by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and staff writer Shane Harris about a group chat on Signal (one that accidentally included Jeff) dedicated to planning strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
I laughed because I am a former government employee and Senate staffer with a fair amount of experience in dealing with classified information, and the administration’s position that nothing in the chat was classified is ludicrous. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth added a bit of topspin to that position on Monday when he got off a plane in Honolulu and, seemingly in a panic, fulminated against Jeff and tried to deny that any “war plans” were shared in the chat.
Over the next 24 hours, the excuses became even more laughable. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz went on Fox News, accepted “full responsibility,” and called Jeff “scum.” But then Waltz suggested that The Atlantic’s editor in chief had perhaps hacked or schemed his way into the chat, and that this possibility had to be investigated.
What’s funny—again, in an awful way—is that Waltz is the person who invited Jeff into the Signal group. (If you’ve never seen the “hot-dog man” meme, it’s an image of a guy in a hot-dog costume pleading with a crowd to find the person responsible for crashing a nearby wrecked hot-dog car. It’s being used all over social media in relation to this story, and for good reason.) Also appallingly funny is that the president’s own national security adviser doesn’t seem to understand that discussing on an app the details of a U.S. military strike and then admitting that a random person could find himself in the middle of such a discussion—it’s not like he waltzed his way in, if you’ll pardon the expression—makes this whole story even worse.
This morning, the full context of one of the most stunning security breaches in modern military affairs became even clearer when Jeff and Shane released the texts. The messages show that the entire conversation should have been classified and held either in a secure location or over secure communications. (I held a security clearance for most of my career, and I saw information far less specific than this marked as classified.) Hegseth, in particular, was a volcano of military details that are always considered highly classified, spewing red-hot information about the strikes, the equipment to be used, the intelligence collected in deciding on targets, and the sequencing of events.
None of this is funny. If any of this had leaked at the moment Hegseth blathered it over Signal, American servicepeople could have died. (As my friend David French at The New York Times wrote on Monday, if Hegseth had any honor at all, he wouldn’t wait to be fired. He’d resign.)
But I couldn’t help it: I laughed at the reaction of top Trump officials. As I read White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s grammatically challenged statement, in which she claimed that information included in the conversation was “sensitive” but not “classified,” I thought she was trying to engage in some sort of not particularly convincing parsing. But listening to her briefing later in the day, I realized that Leavitt doesn’t seem to know the first thing about classified information. Unfortunately, apparently neither does Hegseth, nor CIA Director John Ratcliffe, nor any of the other people involved in this mess.
And I’m not the only one laughing. During a hearing today, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois tried to get the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, to admit that the messages Hegseth sent over Signal did in fact include classified details of weapons systems. Kruse hemmed and hawed, until Krishnamoorthi just chuckled.
That didn’t stop Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, from putting out yet another howler of a statement today, claiming that the “hoax-peddlers at the Atlantic have already abandoned their ‘war plans’ claim” and that the Signal messages “confirm there were no classified materials or war plans shared. The Secretary was merely updating the group on a plan that was underway and had already been briefed through official channels.”
Either Parnell does not know that this is nonsense or he’s intentionally obfuscating. (The strikes were not, in fact, under way, and American forces would have been more vulnerable to enemy action without the element of surprise. The Atlantic has also not “abandoned” any of the claims in its reporting.) The administration is, in effect, banking on the reality that most people never encounter military terms or classified information, so I’ll explain what it’s like to deal with those kinds of materials under more responsible administrations.
Ratcliffe continues to insist that no classified information was discussed in the chat—despite the fact that he revealed the name of a CIA intelligence officer. (Jeff and Shane, in accordance with a request from the CIA, did not release that one message in this morning’s revelations, another example of how The Atlantic has been more concerned and careful about such matters than Ratcliffe and the other participants in the chat.) The names of intelligence officers are carefully protected, and I’m pretty sure I know the difference here, because I was once married to a CIA analyst. She was an open employee, meaning she could say where she worked. But the agency has many people—and not just spies—who protect their identity, not only to allow them to move more freely in various assignments but also for their own safety.
Indeed, while she and I were dating, the U.S. and its allies launched the first Gulf War in the winter of 1990–91. She worked at Langley with a CIA clearance, and I was on the personal staff of a senator with a top-secret Defense Department clearance. She knew a lot about what foreign countries were doing. I knew a lot about our military movements and the state of the enemy’s forces. We did not discuss classified information with each other even in the privacy of our own homes. We would laugh over dinner because we both had things we wanted to share but couldn’t. We had sworn not to discuss classified information outside of a secure environment with people who did not have the appropriate institutional clearances—so, like the two adults we were, we just didn’t. That’s common across the classified world, then and now.
Now, let’s get to those Hegseth texts. The administration apparently thinks that “war plans” and “attack plans” are different, and as a general observation, they are. But that’s because detailed attack plans are vastly more dangerous than almost any other plans if they’re released.“War plans,” a term that doesn’t really have a particular meaning in the world of military documents, presumably refers to some scenario for a hypothetical future conflict, but if Hegseth’s position is that he didn’t release “war plans” and instead released only the details of the imminent movements of U.S. military forces, then he is not only reckless; he also doesn’t understand some basic concepts about defense planning, operations, and national security. Some of Hegseth’s defenders now claim that he’d likely declassified all of these details by the time they appeared in the chat. Declassification is within his power; if he chose to declassify the details before the operation was launched, however, then he is more incompetent than even his critics realize.
Think of it this way. Imagine your local police department is trying to deal with the threat from a local drug gang. “We have concerns about this gang” and “We will act to arrest these bad guys” would be unclassified. (Many police departments, by the way, do have intelligence units and produce restricted information.) “Our undercover officers have been watching this house” might be classified: You don’t want the bad guys knowing what you know or how you know it. (These are the “sources and methods” often referenced when talking about such information.) “We are going to execute a warrant at this hour, in this place, with this many people, armed with the following weapons” would be extremely classified. If that information is released early, the gang knows that the good guys are on the way—and might choose to ambush the cops.
Hegseth spilled the equivalent of those details just hours before the strike. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing, and he was almost certainly just showing off. But he put lives at risk by transferring information that is always classified at a high level to an unclassified system—the Signal app—one of the basic sins every government employee is warned never to commit when handling such materials. He then splattered that information across a chat to more than a dozen other people who had no need to know any of it. (“Need to know” is a very restrictive condition: Did Hegseth think anyone in that chat was going to pipe up at the last minute and say, “Wait a moment, Pete, maybe we should rethink sending the Tomahawks in after the second strike”?) In any case, “need to know” definitely does not include a reporter added to the chat by accident.
The president said yesterday that no classified information “as I understand it” was included in the chat, inviting some unsettling questions about what the president does and does not understand. (Trump today mentioned “a bad signal”; as CNN noted, he was “apparently conflating the name of the Signal app with an error in the communications.”)
For anyone who has a bit more competence in dealing with classified material, especially during wartime, seeing top defense and intelligence officials be so sloppy, and do things for which lesser mortals would be fired or even prosecuted, is vertigo inducing. Watching them flail, make excuses, and try to evade responsibility is both nauseating and amusing. But realizing the risks these senior officials took with the lives of American military personnel is enraging—and should be to every sensible American, no matter their party or cause.
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But really, who among us hasn’t inadvertently shared secret plans about an imminent military strike on Yemen with the editor in chief of TheAtlantic?
Wait, what?
Occasionally, Washington gets hit with one of those stories. The kind that halts the busy company town in its divided tracks. Everyone seems to unite, at least briefly, in disbelief. A single dominant topic comes along and crushes everything, and all the rest is suddenly beside the point. It rarely happens in this day and age of competing social-media ecosystems. But yesterday was one of those days. Even Elon Musk could barely crack the headlines.
The group gobsmacking began shortly after noon, when TheAtlantic dropped a bombshell story headlined “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” Spoiler alert: The story is about how the Trump administration accidentally texted the author its war plans.
You’ve likely heard about this by now. Said author—TheAtlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg—somehow was added to an extremely sensitive discussion, on the nongovernmental messaging app Signal, about a planned U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen. The chat, seemingly initiated by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, appeared to include Secretary of State Marco Rubio (delineated by his initials, “MAR”), the vice president (“JD Vance”), the defense secretary (“Pete Hegseth”), the Treasury secretary (“Scott B”), Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (“TG”), and other Trump-administration principals. Presumably, the discussion was not meant to include Goldberg, or “JG,” as he was identified.
This was, to say the least, an extraordinary security breach caused by uncommon recklessness at the tippy-top of the national defense hierarchy. It also constituted a major scoop by The Atlantic, so before I go any further, I should disclose that I work for TheAtlantic. Yay TheAtlantic!
The news spread fast across the capital. Jaw-dropping appeared to be the dominant go-to descriptor. Trump critics promptly circulated old statements from Republicans railing against Hillary Clinton for having a private email account when she was secretary of state. Users on X resurfaced a clip of Hegseth speaking on Fox News about President Joe Biden “flippantly” handing classified documents, and a post from Gabbard promising that “any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law.” (The White House has said that no classified information was shared on the Signal thread.)
Within a few hours, the fiasco had been christened “Signalgate,” proving that no matter how much Washington changes, the un-clever naming construction of its scandals remains stuck in the Watergate era.
How could such a stupefying breach take place? How was this error not immediately discovered and “JG” not swiftly removed? Who did Waltz and his colleagues think “JG” actually was? The best running theory seems to be Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative. Or perhaps someone mistook Jeffrey Goldberg for Jeff Goldblum’s character in Independence Day. Also: Why don’t defense secretaries ever text me their war plans?
“You’re saying that they had what?” Donald Trump replied when he was asked by reporters about The Atlantic’s access to the channel, a few hours after the story came out. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, a bit surprisingly. “I’m not a big fan of TheAtlantic,” he added, less surprisingly.
I might have been misreading Trump’s expression, but for a split second, he seemed genuinely taken aback by what he was told. There was something familiar and maybe a bit comforting about the universal sense of shock: What took place yesterday was a rare pop-up scandal in the Trump era that brought bipartisan recognition of a massive mistake having been committed.
Soon enough, MAGA world would regain its hostile posture and proceed with its requisite smearing of the messenger. Trump repeated his false claim that The Atlantic is going out of business. Hegseth called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” (exactly the kind of guy you’d want to be sharing war plans with).
This morning, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, claiming that “Goldberg is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” denied that war plans had been shared. A prime-time chyron on Fox News last night offered a friendly public-service reminder: “We’ve all texted the wrong person before.”
But even Leavitt admitted error at least to a degree, stating that the White House was investigating “how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread.” The Signal chat group “appears to be authentic,” the White House National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes said in a statement yesterday, confirming what he’d told Goldberg for the story. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson assured reporters that Team Trump would “make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Everyone should know better than putting top-secret war plans on an unclassified phone,” Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska told CNN. “Period. There is no excuse.”
“Sounds like a huge screwup. I mean, is there any other way to describe it?” Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas said when asked about the mishap. Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s former transportation secretary, agreed, though he chose another way to describe it: “This is the highest level of fuckup imaginable,” he wrote on X.
Hillary Clinton did not miss her chance to weigh in. “You have got to be kidding me,” she wrote, with an eyes emoji.
Speaking to reporters today, Trump did not rule out people in his administration using Signal again in the future. But he did not sound enthused about it, and POTUS (or “DJT,” or “47”) does not seem likely to join the app soon. “I don’t think it’s something we’re looking forward to using again,” the president said.
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President Donald Trump didn’t know what Signal was.
Shortly before facing reporters yesterday afternoon, Trump was told by aides about a story publishing in The Atlantic disclosing that the magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been accidentally added to a group chat on the messaging app Signal, two White House officials told me on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Goldberg was still in the chat when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared plans for a military strike against the Houthis in Yemen.
Trump—who is famously reluctant to use any electronic messaging, and who started sending the occasional text message only during his last campaign—had not heard of the encrypted app and opted against weighing in when he spoke with the press, the officials said. Instead, Trump insisted he knew little about the matter while taking a swipe at Goldberg and this publication.
But since then, the two officials and an outside adviser told me, the president has grown frustrated at the incident’s sloppiness and the negative headlines it has spawned—including from a contentious congressional hearing today—even as he and his allies have focused on attacking the media rather than showing outward concern for the apparent flagrant national-security breach.
“That’s an app that a lot of people use. And somebody got on. I happen to know the guy is a total sleazebag. The Atlantic is a failed magazine, does very, very poorly. Nobody gives a damn about it,” Trump said to reporters today at the White House.
Trump said that his team “would take a look at” the security of Signal but did not commit to banning its use, instead declaring that “our national security now is stronger than it’s ever been.”
The president’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said he is investigating how a journalist was added to the chat group. (The transcript of the Signal chat shows that Waltz added Goldberg.)
The report has rippled across Washington, as Democrats demand investigations into the security lapse while Republicans and the White House have tried to downplay the breach. Trump was, of course, elected in 2016 with a campaign that was in part centered on the handling of sensitive materials by his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and his administration has pledged to sharply crack down on leaks to the media. Yet it tried to shift blame and publicly shrug off one of the most significant blunders in decades.
Goldberg wrote yesterday that he watched as the chat’s participants—including Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President J. D. Vance—discussed details of an imminent attack against Houthi rebels. Republicans, including Trump, denied that the chats contained classified information.
Trump has indicated to advisers that he wanted to watch how the story played out in the media in the days ahead but instructed them to defend those involved. A familiar playbook was then enacted by those in the administration: Attack the source. Hegseth fired the opening volleys last night after landing in Hawaii, as he tried to discredit Goldberg, a journalist Trump has previously attacked, while admitting little wrongdoing. Trump told aides he appreciated Hegseth’s blustery defense. The president spoke with his national security adviser late last night about the incident and this morning told NBC in a brief interview that “Waltz has learned a lesson and he’s a good man.”
But for some within the West Wing, there was a sense of a serious mistake. Many in the administration recall the sloppiness and chaos of Trump’s first term and have prided themselves on conducting a smoother and more professional operation so far this time around. The episode with the group chat evoked the disorganization of Trump 1.0, officials said. When Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took to X this morning to downplay the contents of the thread, some Trump allies privately expressed fear that she was opening up the White House to further problems if the facts did not ultimately match her characterization. There was less immediate scrutiny of Hegseth among Trump allies; the defense secretary resonates with the president’s base in a way that Waltz does not. Still, the two officials told me that—unless the story truly snowballs in the days ahead—Trump is unlikely to push out his national security adviser. Optics, and not national security, are paramount in Trump’s reasoning.
“The last thing he wants to do is give you guys [in the media] a scalp,” one of the officials said.
Yet the image-conscious president was not happy with how the story is playing out on television; it’s the rare negative story that has broken through, at least somewhat, even on conservative-leaning outlets.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, delivered uneven and at times contradictory performances this morning when they testified before Congress that the Signal chat didn’t include classified information. Democratic senators challenged that view.
“This is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly toward classified information,” said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who serves as the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Gabbard initially declined to acknowledge that she had participated in the Signal chat, only to later say that she was traveling abroad during the period in which the chat occurred. Ratcliffe confirmed that he had participated but then said he didn’t remember any discussion of “weapons packages” or other operational details that were reported. He also said that the chat’s contents shouldn’t be considered to be secret because Hegseth has the authority to determine whether Defense Department information is classified and he has insisted it wasn’t.
The Signal discussion lasted days and included specific information about timing, weapons, and targets. Signal, a nongovernmental messaging service, is encrypted, but the app and nongovernment cellphones are vulnerable to hacking. A memo obtained by The Atlantic warning about Signal’s vulnerabilities was circulated to former CIA officers this month, just days before the Houthi PC Small Group was formed.
“This is not a trivial matter—using a commercial messaging app like Signal to discuss sensitive national-security operations is sloppy, inappropriate, and puts our troops at risk,” Chris Meagher, a former top Pentagon spokesperson in the Biden administration, told me. “These discussions should take place in either secure spaces or on secure devices. There are no other options.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The messages also revealed that Vance was skeptical of the need to strike the Houthis to protect international shipping, because European nations relied much more on trade through the Red Sea than the U.S. does. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” Vance wrote. “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”
One of the White House officials told me that Trump has not spoken to Vance about the vice president’s second-guessing. Vance later moved to support the attacks, writing in the chain, “I will say a prayer for victory.”
Two other administration officials responded with prayer emojis.
If there was a mascot to represent everything that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sees wrong with food, it would be Big Daddy’s Primo Pizza. A staple of school cafeterias, Big Daddy’s pizza bills itself as an “over-the-top exceptional slice to entice students” that’s made with whole-wheat flour. It’s mass-produced in a factory with industrial additives so that it just needs to be reheated right before serving. That makes the pizza an ultra-processed food, which Kennedy is set on removing from school lunches. Except he can’t. The Department of Agriculture, which sets the rules for school nutrition, isn’t under his jurisdiction as secretary of Health and Human Services.
RFK Jr. sometimes talks as though he has the power to unilaterally fix America’s food problems. But his attempts to do so will go only so far, at least in part by virtue of the absurdity of how food is regulated. The job is split between the FDA and the USDA, sometimes in ways that make little sense. Consider the issue of food safety. Regardless of whether a pepperoni pizza will be sold in schools or the grocery store, its safety is overseen by the USDA. Inspectors typically visit facilities where frozen pizza is topped with pepperoni at least once a day—inspectors are also present at the slaughterhouse where the pig is butchered and the plant where the actual pepperoni is made. Meanwhile, because frozen cheese pizza is meatless, its safety falls to the FDA, which inspects most facilities at least once every five years. Open-faced sandwiches that contain meat are also regulated by the USDA, but slap another piece of bread on top, and they’re the FDA’s problem.
Yes, two different agencies both employ inspectors to do ostensibly the same thing—inspect food products—in some of the same factories, solely because a USDA employee inspecting a company making open-face sandwiches isn’t allowed to address the health and safety of the closed sandwiches nearby. None of this is efficient. In fact it is so inefficient that the Government Accountability Office, the government’s independent watchdog, has warned that the food-safety system is at high risk for “fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” Are you listening, Elon? The Trump administration is sleeping on a move that would please both the MAHA crowd and the backers of DOGE: creating a single agency for food safety and nutrition policy. Call it the Department of Food Oversight and Optimal Diets.
Democrats, too, should want a Department of FOOD. In fact, Democratic lawmakers in Congress have introduced legislation proposing a single food agency at several points over the past 20 years. America’s discombobulated approach to food is the by-product of a century’s worth of bureaucracy. In 1906, Congress passed two separate laws setting different food-safety standards for meat and nonmeat products. At the time, both sets of rules were enforced by the USDA, until the FDA was carved out of it in 1940. Since then, the question of who is in charge of what has gotten only more complex. When the EPA was created during the Nixon administration, for example, regulating how much pesticide can be present on the food you buy was transferred to the new agency.
Perhaps most maddening about the status quo is that food is simultaneously over- and under-regulated. The USDA is understandably rigorous about the safety of meat, but pepperoni pizza being inspected three different times is hard to justify, argues Sandra Eskin, who led the USDA’s food-safety arm during the Biden administration. At the same time, the FDA lacks the staff to inspect every factory, and the result is that meat receives far more scrutiny than many other products, such as bags of chips and frozen cheese pizzas. The different levels of oversight is “hard to defend,” Thomas Gremillion, the director of food policy at Consumer Federation of America, which advocates for more stringent food-safety regulations, told me. A single food agency would be able to more easily reallocate resources to even out the gaps. (Neither the FDA nor the USDA responded to a request for comment.)
The Department of FOOD wouldn’t just be more efficient; it could also help address the nation’s diet woes. Consider salt. Americans are estimated to consume nearly 50 percent more than what the U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend, and advocacy groups have long urged the FDA to do something about it. But Congress has balked at the USDA’s and FDA’s relatively modest attempts to clamp down on how much salt can be added to our food. Last March, lawmakers added language into a government funding bill that would delay the FDA from releasing new sodium-reduction goals and prevent the USDA from further restricting the amount of salt in school meals. Regulators’ hands were tied.
A Department of FOOD that is funded independently of Congress would be a way out of this mess. Independent agencies can pursue policies without as much fear of Congress revoking their funding for pursuing a politically unpopular rule. All of this might seem a bit pie in the sky; creating a new independent agency is no small feat. Congress would very likely need to pass a law to make it happen, even though the Department of FOOD would be insulated from their demands. To create any new agency takes “just a hell of a lot of work to pull it off,” Peter Lurie, the head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which led the campaign for the FDA to mandate lower salt levels, told me. But something similar has happened before: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau centralized various agencies’ responsibilities into one independent organization after a raft of subprime mortgages led to the financial crisis of 2008.
Political inertia is on the Trump administration’s side. Diet-related disease is a crisis in its own right. More than 40 percent of American adults are now obese, as is approximately one in five children. Kennedy himself talks a lot about how food is making Americans sick, and other Republicans are listening. Several Republican lawmakers have insisted in recent weeks that the FDA needs to get more serious about regulating food additives, such as dyes. If Kennedy were to argue that a new food agency was the best way to achieve these goals, surely Republicans would have to listen. At the same time, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and its efforts to dissolve whole government agencies are opening the door to drastic action.
Of course, Musk seems more intent on outright destroying the federal agencies than creating government reform. Kennedy, likewise, seems focused more so on overly simplistic solutions, like firing the staff of FDA’s food center, than on altering the structures that have made those workers so inefficient. That neither Kennedy or Musk has said anything about consolidating the food agencies says a lot in its own right. If you actually wanted to make the government more efficient, the Department of FOOD would be an easy place to start. But right now in the Trump administration, proposing a new agency isn’t nearly as good of a talking point as blowing one up.
It’s happened to the best of us. We mistakenly send a text about a colleague we are mad at to that very colleague. We accidentally include our mom on the sibling text chain about our mom. Today on Radio Atlantic, a much higher-stakes texting error: TheAtlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, received a connection request on Signal from a “Michael Waltz,” which is the name of President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. Two days later, he was added to a group text with top administration officials created for the purpose of coordinating high-level national-security conversations about the Houthis in Yemen. On March 15, Goldberg sat in his car in a grocery-store parking lot waiting to see if the strike would actually happen. The bombs fell. The text thread had to be real.
We talk with Goldberg about this absurd chain of events, and with Shane Harris, who covers national security for TheAtlantic, about what it means that defense officials were discussing detailed war plans on a text chain.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: On March 15, the U.S. began a bombing campaign against Houthi groups in Yemen. A couple of hours before that, our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, sat in his car in a supermarket parking lot, waiting to see if and when the attack would start. How he knew about this military campaign is a very weird story. Not long ago, Jeff was added to a text chain of very important people in the administration. Presumably, he was added to it by accident.
I know, it happens to the best of us—but there was the editor of The Atlantic monitoring the back-and-forth between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J. D. Vance, and others, wondering: Could this possibly be real? In fact, Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, later confirmed that it was indeed all real. I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic, and today, we have on the show editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, to explain what happened and what it might mean.
Jeff, welcome to the show.
Jeffrey Goldberg: Hey, Hanna.
Rosin: Hi, Shane.
Shane Harris: Hi.
Rosin: Jeff, on Tuesday, March 11, you get a Signal message from a user identified as Michael Waltz, which is also the name of President Trump’s national security adviser. Where are you when you get this message, and what are you thinking?
Goldberg: Weirdly and randomly, I was in Salzburg, Austria, and what I’m thinking is not much, because in my line of work, that wouldn’t be the craziest thing to happen.
Rosin: Like, it could be him; it could be someone pretending to be him. You’re not that fussed.
Goldberg: Well, I am always cautious about people reaching out across social media or messaging apps.
I don’t assume that they’re the person that the name suggests, but I would have to say that I was glad, also, and I was hoping that it was the actual Michael Waltz, because I’d like to be in regular contact with Michael Waltz for all the obvious journalistic reasons.
Rosin: Right. So you’re like, Oh, maybe he has a scoop for me.
Goldberg: Yeah.
Rosin: Okay, so then what happens next? You’re going about your life, going about your business, and …
Goldberg: And then I get added to a group, a Signal group—you know, a text-messaging chat group—called “Houthi PC small group.” PC I know from covering White House issues, you know: “Principals Committee,” basically the top leaders of Cabinet departments generally associated with national-security issues, and then a message from Mike Waltz talking about how he’s putting together this PC small group to talk about the Houthis, because something’s gonna be happening over the next 72 hours. That’s when I sort of think—I mean, honestly, the first thing I thought was: I’m really being spoofed. Like, somebody is—this is a hoax. This is a state or nonstate actor, probably nonstate actor, looking to entrap, embarrass, whatever word you wanna use, a journalist.
Rosin: Right. So you’re on alert. Like, it’s a little bit interesting, but also …
Goldberg: Hanna, as you know, I’m always on alert.
Rosin: Yeah, okay, okay, okay.
Goldberg: Hanna, what am I gonna tell you?
Rosin: All right, so then, so maybe it’s a spoof, maybe it’s not. How does it start to get more real?
Goldberg: Well, it gets real in the sense that if somebody’s doing a spoof, it’s a very, very accurate spoof. What happens is, a number of Cabinet-level officials start reporting into this chain, giving the names of their deputies or contact people over the weekend, when, clearly, something’s gonna happen in Yemen. Uh, in retrospect, clearly something’s gonna happen in Yemen. And that was that for that day; it was the next day that they start engaging in a policy discussion really in earnest. And it’s, you know, explicated in the story that I wrote. But, um, that’s when I’m sort of thinking to myself, If this is a simulation or this is a fake, someone’s going to a huge, huge length to make it seem real, because everybody in the chat sounds like the person who they’re quote-unquote playing. So I don’t say I’m 50–50; I’m still 60, 70, you know, 70–30 this is a fakery, because, for the simple reason that this is nuts—I mean, obviously why, why would I be involved in this?
Rosin: I wouldn’t even know what to think, because yeah, like, we include people on text chains who we shouldn’t. Like, the mistake seems as implausible as the reality—like, every version seems implausible.
Goldberg: We all make the mistake. This is why this is so relatable. Yeah. We all … I’m thinking of Shane, and I’m writing to Hanna about Shane—an assignment, or how great Shane is. And I type in Shane into the recipient, because that’s the name that’s on my mind.
I don’t know what was going on in Mike Waltz’s mind, who he was thinking of—we’re trying to figure that out, still trying to figure that out. But in any case, I was added to this group, and it’s a misdirected email or text chain that I shouldn’t have been on. But the larger point—and obviously Shane can speak to this—the larger point is that: Why is this conversation happening out in the open? Now, I know Signal is end-to-end encrypted, but it’s a commercial texting service that anyone, not just people with security clearances in the federal government, can join.
So, so, and that’s the essential danger, and that’s, if you want to think about it, an original sin. The original sin is communicating very sensitive information in a channel where you can mistakenly bring in—I mean, forget the editor of The Atlantic. You could have brought in a Houthi, for all you know. You could bring in somebody who is actively sympathetic to the Houthis and sharing real-time information with you. That’s somewhat appalling.
Rosin: So, Shane, I’m gonna ask you about that in a second, but I need one more part of the story before we move on to that. Give me an example of—you said it sounded like them. Like, if it was a simulation, it was an amazing simulation. Can you give us an example?
Goldberg: Sure: Pete Hegseth writing an all-caps about how he finds the Europeans pathetic. J. D. Vance sounding like a kind of quasi-isolationist, talking about: Why would we do this sort of thing? Europe doesn’t—Europe should take care of this problem; it’s not our problem. Trade conversations. The most interesting one, and the one that I thought, Whoa, that really does sound like the guy: At the end of this chain, Stephen Miller, or I should say “S M,” a person identified as “S M,” comes in and basically shuts the conversation down and said, I heard the president. He was clear to me; he wants to do this. It was basically—and obviously this is really interesting—it’s a conversation with not only the secretaries of state, treasury, and defense, but the vice president of the United States, and here comes Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff, ostensibly just deputy chief of staff, coming in and saying, Uh, everybody, uh, the president spoke. I heard it. Y’all need to just stop doing what you’re doing. And then everybody kind of gets in line and, like: All right, well I guess we’re attacking Yemen.
Rosin: It’s so crazy that you’re just watching this conversation unfold.
Goldberg: Look, the White House has confirmed that this is an authentic chain, but we’re still trying to figure out some aspects of it. I still don’t know the identities of one or two people, because they had their initials. So when we talk about them, I’m assuming that “S M” is Stephen Miller, but I’m not guaranteeing that to you.
That’s a good example of one person. On the other hand, obviously, the one called “Hegseth” is Hegseth.
Rosin: So you heard Vance disagree with the president, which almost never happens publicly. That’s interesting.
Goldberg: I mean, to be fair to all vice presidents and presidents, it never happens in any administration, where a vice president is gonna go out and, I mean, of course he didn’t go out here. He thought he was—actually, it’s really, it’s interesting, because Vance is saying in the conversation: I don’t think the president understands the ramifications of what he’s doing. He’s saying that to people who work for the president. It’s kind of a bold move, to say: Trump doesn’t understand what’s going on. And now if I’m just sort of—this is just speculation—but if I’m Stephen Miller, and I’m reading that, and I’m the enforcer, I’m like: Okay, thanks, J. D. That’ll be enough of that.
Rosin: Right, right, right, right, right. So some of the things are, like, overheard across the bathroom stall—you don’t hear them in public. Other things are, like, exactly as you expect.
Goldberg: Right, right, right. Other things are exactly as I expect. I mean, even later in the story, when, after the first successful strike on the Houthis in Yemen—
Rosin: And that’s when you know this was real.
Goldberg: Well, then I know it’s real, because I was told beforehand that it was gonna happen, in my phone, and then two hours later it happens.
That’s pretty good proof that, you know, if somebody is spoofing this, then it’s not some media-gadfly organization. It’s a foreign intelligence service that had knowledge of the U.S. strikes—seems implausible. But then the part that really struck me as very Trump administration was the sharing of all these emojis: flag emojis, muscle emojis, fire emojis.
Rosin: Prayer emoji.
Goldberg: Prayer emoji, which, you know, and it’s like, by the way, I mean, it was—talk about relatable. It’s like every workplace—I mean, this is what I actually thought when I’m seeing this come over the phone, is Wow, every workplace is the same. It’s like, Big victory! We got the new, you know, the Dunder Mifflin contract, and, you know, muscle emoji, and it’s like, here was, you know, We took out some Houthis!Good, good, good work, everybody. So that’s when I thought, Wow, these guys are—these could be these guys. Because if I were trying to spoof them, I wouldn’t do something so implausible as to start inserting juvenile emojis into a national-security conversation.
Rosin: Unless you were so good.
Goldberg: Yeah, no, if I had outfoxed myself, you know. I wouldn’t have done that if I were doing a simulation.
Rosin: One more question about your reality: As all this is happening and you’re starting to realize this might be real, are you talking to people about it? Are you in your own reality about it? Are you, like, where are you?
Goldberg: Well, I’m talking to certain colleagues, including and especially Shane, who’s sitting next to me. Shane, who’s been covering the intelligence community for a long while. And, you know, I’m talking to him from the beginning about this, ’cause I do need some reverb, some reaction to it, ’cause it’s never, I’ve never seen this kind of thing or heard of something like this happening.
But when I first showed him just the initial foray—you know, the “we’re having a group”—Shane was like, No, no. Somebody’s trying to—this is an operation. I don’t know who it is, I don’t know why they’re doing it, but this is an op. This is a disinformation operation, because these guys don’t do that.
Rosin: Okay, Shane: “These guys don’t do that.” Why was that your first thought? What don’t they do?
Harris: I mean, what they do is talk about who we’re gonna bomb and why should we bomb them. They don’t do it on Signal. And, I mean, in the initial presentation of this that Jeff gave to me, I thought: Well, this, this sounds crazy. Why would they be that reckless? Why would the national security adviser set up a group, call it, you know, PC Houthi group, and then start adding these people?
And it was actually kind of baffling, too, because, again, if this was a hoax, somebody was going to really great lengths to do it—which could happen.
Goldberg: I mean, you know, sophisticated operations do happen in the intelligence world.
Harris: Then the question was, of course: Why? To what end? So where is this going? And then as it went on, I think it became, like, as Jeff said, increasingly clear that the needle was moving quickly towards authentic. But my initial reaction as to why it was probably not real was: I couldn’t imagine senior national-security officials deciding that it was a good idea to discuss something of this sensitivity where, let’s be clear, pilots are in the air, they could be shot down, people could be killed, people are going to be killed on the ground—things are happening very fast. Why would you not do that in the Situation Room or in a secure facility? Many of these Cabinet officials, by the way, have facilities like that in their house. They can go have those conversations.
Goldberg: Most of the relevant ones, the heads of intelligence agencies, the, obviously, defense secretary and the like, they have plenty of ways to communicate with each other within a minute or two of needing to.
Rosin: Even though Signal’s encrypted?
Harris: Yeah. So the problem is this. There’s a couple problems. One, it’s encrypted, but it’s never been approved by the government for sharing classified or what’s called national-defense information. Now, to be clear, we talked to former security officials, former U.S. officials, who said, Yeah, we did use Signal in the government. We might use it to transmit sort of, um, certainly unclassified, not sensitive information. We might talk around something or, like, notify someone that you’re leaving a particular country. But this level of specificity—actual planning for an ongoing operation, the sharing of intelligence and information about strikes—that is clearly not what Signal’s intended for.
It’s very convenient, and it is relatively safe. I mean, I know, like, some officials who’ve traveled overseas in conflict zones who use it because they’re not near a U.S. embassy, let’s say, but it’s not meant for this kind of detailed planning which occurs as, you know, Mr. Waltz said, at the principals-committee level—that is done in the Situation Room, or that’s done at their various, you know, buildings where these people work.
Rosin: Just so I’m clear, what level of detail crosses the line? I know you don’t wanna say what they actually said about the campaign, but what kinds of details when you saw them were like: That would never happen.
Harris: So details like the number of aircraft that are involved, the kinds of munitions that are being dropped, specific times—
Rosin: That was on the chain?
Harris: Specific targets on the ground, um, you know, intelligence-related matters relating to the strike and to the targets, names of individuals—of U.S. officials—who should not have been put in an unclassified chain because of their status as intelligence officers. You know, you can kind of, like, you can—there’s probably six or seven different kinds of information that are arguably implicated under the rules and the law for how you’re supposed to handle this stuff.
Goldberg: By the way, a lot of it is just common sense. I mean, you read something, and you could tell the difference between strategic information and tactical information. We should deal with the Houthis—fine, right? We should deal—we should do X, Y, and Z, because the Houthis are a threat to commerce and American national-security interests.
This is what we’re gonna do to the Houthis in two hours is not information that the public should have. I mean, even as a reporter I say that, and, like, I’m fascinated. I want to know how they’re making decisions, why they’re making decisions. I wanna know after action why things happened, why they went right, why they went wrong, and so on.
But I don’t want—and I’ve been doing this for a while, as has Shane—I don’t want information before a kinetic action, before a strike of some sort that has to do with the practical aspects of that strike, information that if it got into the wrong hands could actually endanger the lives of Americans.
I mean, the north star for me and Shane and most normal people, normal reporters, is: Look, we don’t want to endanger the lives of American personnel in the field. And that’s why this was—that’s why the Saturday texting, the Saturday chain, was very, very different than the Friday: because it got very practical.
Rosin: When was the bombing campaign?
Goldberg: Saturday the 15th. The first bombs exploded in Yemen around 1:45 p.m. eastern time. I found out at 11:44 eastern time that it was happening.
Rosin: Got it. So just so I understand, it’s like, they’re revealing specificity of plans which are about to take place, which could put lives in danger, yes?
Goldberg: Okay, like, so here’s the thing that crossed my mind all throughout this, which is: Imagine if it weren’t me in that chain. But imagine if it were somebody—I mean, this sounds implausible, but it’s also implausible to include me in the chain—imagine it was somebody who was a Houthi.
Harris: Or an Iranian diplomat.
Goldberg: Or an Iranian diplomat, or a diplomat from another country who was a side deal with the Iranians. They literally would’ve known when things were going to happen.
Rosin: But I have to say: A journalist is no less dangerous. ’Cause you could have published those plans. So you’re not the best choice either.
Goldberg: Um, well, I, I’m the—yes.
Rosin: Of journalists, you’re an excellent choice.
Harris: I mean, a less scrupulous one—
Rosin: But a less scrupulous journalist.
Goldberg: No, no, I mean, and I’m sure there are journalists who disagree with my view, who take a kind of, I would call it nihilistic view, which is, like: Information is information; we should just put it all out there.
Rosin: Right.
Goldberg: And damn the torpedoes. I’m not—that’s not my thing.
Harris: There’s another reason why this was so dangerous that doesn’t have, doesn’t involve mistakenly adding a journalist to the thread. And that is that while Signal—I mean, you said it’s end-to-end encrypted; it’s very good and secure that way. That’s true. But the device that it’s on, right, is your phone. And while the iOS system is pretty good, nation-states—and here I’m talking about China in particular, which, remember, is behind a recent, you know, penetration of the telecom networks called Salt Typhoon—the phone in the pocket of every one of those national-security officials must be presumed to be a No. 1 target for a foreign intelligence service.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Harris: And there are kinds of malware that they could get implanted on that phone. There could be very expensive, very sophisticated stuff that could allow them to read the messages on the phone as they’re being typed. That’s why a system like Signal, even though it’s good end-to-end encryption, is not approved for sharing classified information. ’Cause it’s on your phone, which can be hacked.
Rosin: Right. So it’s obviously sloppy, reckless. Does it violate any laws?
Harris: So there are a couple that it might. Conceivably, it could violate the Espionage Act, which, despite the name, it’s not just about spying; it’s about the handling of what’s called national-defense information. So if this is considered national-defense information, there are provisions of that law governing how you transmit it, who’s allowed to have it—P.S. Someone like Jeff, who doesn’t have a security clearance? Not allowed to have it. So now these officials made this known to someone who wasn’t cleared—inadvertently, so that could be, you know, a mitigating piece of information. There’s also a provision of the Espionage Act that governs what’s called gross negligence in the handling or, more precisely, the mishandling of classified information. This was the provision that the Justice Department looked at when deciding whether to charge Hillary Clinton for using a private email server, and ultimately they did not, and this provision of the law has only, to my knowledge, been successfully used once to prosecute someone. Because it’s ambiguous—what do you mean by “gross negligence”? Was it grossly negligent to put it on Signal? Was it grossly negligent to add Jeff ? The commonsense reaction to that might be yes. So that’s possible that that could, you know, implicate maybe Mike Waltz or Pete Hegseth, even under the law. And then there’s also the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act.
And in this case, I think these text messages are both federal records and presidential records, because they’re coming out of the White House in some cases. And the law says—
Goldberg: Literally, one of the participants is the elected vice president of the United States.
Harris: And another is the White House national security adviser. And we quoted an expert in the story, an expert on these laws, who said: Look, you know, if it’s a presidential record, you have to maintain it. And what that means is, in this case, a backup of these messages would need to be sent to some kind of government official account. If they were doing that, then they’re complying. But there are also DOD regulations about not putting classified information on an unclassified system, as clearly happened here as well.
So you’ve got a couple of laws, maybe two or three laws, provisions of those laws and regulations, that this activity would seem to violate.
Rosin: Well, Jeff, congratulations. You’re now part of the official Trump record—government official record. Okay, theories. I know you don’t know why this happened. Is there some possibility they wanted you to know? Have you run that through your head?
Goldberg: Oh, yeah. I ran all the possibilities through my head. You know, the funny thing is, when they’re having their policy conversation—policy disagreements—I was struck by the sophistication of the arguments. Some were, you know, sort of knee-jerk, anti-Europe kind of invective that one expects, but they were having a serious conversation about what to do about a challenging problem—a problem, by the way, they were left with by the Biden administration, which did not handle that situation well or adequately.
So they were, this is something they inherited, and they’re trying to work their way through it. As they were doing that, I was thinking to myself, Oh, maybe they want me to see this. So I write a story about how clever they are in dealing with the Houthis. And I thought, That’s very kind of a circular way of getting somebody to write something about—
Harris: Like, Waltz could just call you. He has your number.
Goldberg: They could just call me and say, I’d like to do an interview with you about our Yemen policy, and I’d be like, Great, let’s do it. So I couldn’t, I can’t—you know, Occam’s razor explains a lot of the world, and the explanation here is that it was heading into the weekend; they were out and about; things were happening in the Middle East that they had to stay in touch with; they have these amazing devices in their pockets, like we all do, where they can communicate with the world; they put together a group; they put it together sloppily; and they did it on something that they shouldn’t have done but for convenience; and, uh, that’s it. That’s what happened.
Rosin: So given that that can happen to the best of us and does happen to all of us all the time, is there—
Goldberg: You’re always, you’re always planning the bombings of countries on your phone with your podcast team.
Rosin: I mean, like, adding the wrong person to a text chain. So given that that happens to the best of us, can you draw any particular conclusions about the Trump administration? Like, does it reveal anything to you about them that’s specific, as opposed to just, you know, they’re sloppy like the rest of us?
Harris: I think there’s that aspect too, which, I mean, there is a little bit of a Who among us?, right? We’ve all done this—I mean, not about planning a war—but we know what this is like and how embarrassing and unintentional it can actually be. But what I do think this shows is a level of recklessness. There’s just no world in which a reasonable person serving these positions would think it’s okay to discuss this kind of active operation, I think, in this way. Now, there may be people who would challenge me on that, and there may be people who would say, Listen, it’s not as bad as it looks; they weren’t getting into totally the operational weeds—even though I think they actually were. You could make excuses for that, but just as a judgment matter, this was a bad one. It was a bad call, I think, to use Signal in this way. It’s not approved for this way. And you can see why it was such a bad call, because a horrible accident like this, from their perspective, can happen. But what I also think it reveals, too—and this is important to the policy debate—is there is not agreement in the administration over whether they’re doing the right thing with this action. There is widespread agreement, it seems, that they should make the Europeans try to pay for this military action, ’cause it’s mostly European goods that are moving through this part of the world. But when the vice president comes out and says, I disagree, and I don’t think that the president understands the implications for this and how it will affect his foreign policy—that’s quite striking.
And you see in the messages how they’re referring back to previous meetings that they had where it seemed to some people in the room like this issue was settled. But apparently it wasn’t. And they go on this kind of extended debate about: Well, should we wait a month? And then Stephen Miller, as Jeff said, comes in and says, No, the president said we’re doing this.
And so you see that there’s not clarity around the president’s decision making around the policy, and that is just—to be a fly on the wall for that is extraordinary. That’s very revealing about the policy process in this White House.
Rosin: You mean for such an important decision that there are last-minute disagreements that haven’t been buttoned up, that haven’t been hashed out, that haven’t gone through proper channels or, you know, like, thoughtfully resolved?
Goldberg: I think they were—I mean, apart from the fact that they were doing it on an insecure channel in the presence of the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine—apart from those two technical issues, they were having a reasonable conversation that you would expect them to have.
And like I said, I was a little bit heartened that, Oh—they actually debate among themselves. They talk about this; they work through these things. They seem to be—as Shane pointed out, this is obviously the residue from other meetings that were taking place live and in person, where they’re still working out issues.
What I found—maybe just on a personal level or a, you know, a citizen level—disconcerting was when “S M,” who we assume is Stephen Miller or presume is Stephen Miller, when he comes in and says, Nah, I didn’t hear that. I heard the president say, “We’re doing it.” Thank you very much. Call it a day. And then everybody—
Harris: And no one disagrees.
Goldberg: And then everybody, including the secretary of defense, goes: Agree.
But I have to say, and I want to be very clear here, when I understood that this was real, I did remove myself from the group and began the process of writing this so that I could make the public aware, our reading public aware, that this government had, um, let’s just say poor digital hygiene. So it’s a very serious thing and I would rather not be engaged in that kind of text chain.
Rosin: Well, Jeff, Shane, thank you for joining us today.
Harris and Goldberg: Thank you.
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/podsub. That’s TheAtlantic.com/podsub. I’m Hanna Rosin—thank you for listening.
