‘That’s a lie’: Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg reacts to Hegseth’s claims about group chat

Secretary hug said they were saying that nobody was texting war plans given you were privy to this group chat? Is that how you saw it? No, that's a lie.

He was texting war plans. He was texting attack plans when, targets were going to be targeted, how they were going to be targeted. Who was at the targets?

When the next sequence of attacks were happening? I didn't publish this. And I continue not to publish it because it felt like it was too confidential to technical.

and I worry honestly that, sharing that kind of information in public could endanger American military personnel. But no, they were they were plans for the attack that's never texted before the attack. And there were things texted that you viewed as so sensitive, you did not even publish them in your report today.

I made the decision that this the technical aspects of this, including what kinds of weapons packages, the attack, sequencing and so on. That's not necessarily in the public interest. What's in the public interest is that they were running a, a war plan on a messaging app, and didn't even know who was invited into the conversation.

I mean, it's a, obvious, ridiculous security breach. And, you know, he if you notice, he didn't actually answer the question, but his his attempt at a denial also stood out to me because no one that I talked to at the white House today argued this or tried to say these were, you know, misconstrued or altered or this is not real. I mean, the National Security Council confirmed the the veracity of the National Security Council.

I asked, various officials, including Fedex, at this morning for comment. and the first question I had of everyone is this real? I wanted to make sure, obviously, before we go public and say, are you sure that this is not a disinformation campaign run by a foreign state, non-state actors of some sort trying to target a journalist for reasons I couldn't explain.

and they're like, no, no, this is, this is, apparently a a real channel. And I appreciate them telling the truth about that. And we published.

Did they seem alarmed when you reached out for comment? I probably is not the happiest day that they experienced in the white House so far, but, they were professional about it. I thought that as you were kind of walking through when this began, you weren't even sure if it was real yourself.

You thought maybe I'm being spun or conned or something until until the day that I received the attack plan from Pete Hegseth at 11:44 a. m. that Saturday, March 15th, and then saw the attack plan said that 1345 1:45 p.

m. Eastern time that the first bombs would be dropping in Yemen. until that moment.

And so that period elapsed, the two hour period between that text and the first bombs being dropped. I thought it was a hoax. I thought somebody was trying to entrap me.

again, could it have been a foreign intelligence service, could have been a gadfly organization that tries to entrap journalists, which we know happens. I didn't know what it was or or who it was, but what I did know was that the obvious answer was that this is a real conversation of the national security leadership of the United States. Seemed improbable to me, because why would they do it on signal?

Why would they do this on a messaging app? And why would they invite the editor in chief of The Atlantic to watch? And how many people were on this chat?

18. And did any of them, at any point when you were included in here, ever raised that that question why are we talking about this over a signal? Nobody nobody raised the question.

Why are we talking about this over signals? and nobody said, hey, who is JG? You know, because you show up in a little bubble as your initials and no one at any point said who's.

And when I withdrew from the group, you formally remove yourself, you hit a button. it says JJ has removed himself from the group. I assume that somebody would say, hey, who?

Who just removed himself from the groups? Nothing. You didn't hear from Mike Wallace or anyone else after that?

No, no. Nothing at all. I mean, it's it's, a level of curiosity.

I guess that's the polite way of saying it. It's a level of recklessness that I have not seen in many years of reporting on national security issues. And so you eventually remove yourself from the chat.

Once I was sure that it was real. But after you've seen everything, I mean, you published these messages. I don't know what I haven't seen since then, but yes, I, I remove myself and I started writing the story that in order to expose the security breach and some white House reporters today were saying maybe I would have never remove myself from that.

You know, these are these are tough. These are tough questions. but and I can't go into it all the decision making involved in this, but, I found out what I needed to find out, that it was real, and b that it did represent the kind of gap, the metric sized gap in their secure ity that I could never have imagined, a white House, experiencing.

I mean, because you're a reporter and probably, a worst nightmare to have someone included on a chat, but a foreign adversary or someone who who wanted to do real harm to the United States. I think that's the concern. That is so obvious.

Look, I say this only half jokingly. I mean, I'm sitting in a Safeway parking lot watching my phone and realizing, oh my God, this might be real. I think Pete Hegseth just sent this group, actual targeting information and actual sequencing of an attack.

and I'm holding on to the phone. I don't want anybody. And then I thought to myself, well, I mean, I guess they're lucky they didn't send this to a Houthi by mistake or to a foreign diplomat, or to somebody who could plausibly be in one of their phones.

I guess that counts as a kind of luck. That's why they don't. That's why they're not supposed to use open source, privately owned messaging services.

They're supposed to keep all those conversations on what they call the high side. That's the classified cyber. Only government officials who are cleared to talk about this stuff get to talk about it.

That's why they have that. You typically can't even download signal to a classified device that like that they issue with the Pentagon, for example. Is there anyone in the group chat who surprised you that you were wondering why would they be included in this conversation?

It was an interesting chat. It wasn't just CIA or intelligence officials, not just defense officials. The Secretary of State was there.

Secretary of Treasury was there, the white House chief of Staff was there. White House political aides like Stephen Miller, I believe, was there. it was a pretty broad group given, you know, given that the level that it was at, it was just a kind of an all encompassing coordination, group for a specific action.

I would say, to answer your question, I, I've been surprised by most aspects of this story since I first got invited into the signal chat. I mean, what have you heard today? I mean, I was getting blown up about this messages of people saying that they couldn't believe what they were reading in your piece, what did you hear from people today that they couldn't believe what they were hearing?

And in the piece, I mean, like I said, I mean, I'm very interested obviously, in what the professionals say about this professional reporters who cover these issues, like I have, people who have been in government, and, you know, it's a combination of extreme bad luck. Who did? How could you possibly invite the editor of The Atlantic into your chat?

what are the chances of that? and also just, real anxiety and anger, both about, the sloppiness. Remember, American service people were involved directly in this attack.

It wasn't just standoff weapons fired from a thousand miles away, you know, but you can't just put out this kind of information, and hope for the best. The other piece that that people are upset about, and there's a lot of military people feel this way is like, hey, you know, we have guidelines about how we're supposed to handle sensitive information. We have to pass tests every year on this.

We get punished if we leave something on a desk, you know, we get punished if we don't put it in the safe. What's going to happen here? These guys are just chatting.

They're sitting, you know, on the weekends in their homes, at stores, at restaurants, on their phones and and what's going to happen, you know, they're wondering if there's a couple a, you know, a double standard. What did you make of the argument that what we keep hearing from officials, this revealed the thoughtful and deliberative process that they went through, because there was there was disagreement over how to proceed, which I want to ask you about a moment, but but what did you make of that saying? This actually just reveals how this process worked.

Does it does I mean, that was part of the interesting part of the reporting for me was that, oh, wow. We just found out that JD Vance really disagrees with the president on this particular issue. JD Vance made a compelling argument.

other people counter the argument. What was really interesting was that the person designated SM, which I took to be Stephen Miller, shut down that conversation, said, I heard the president say, we're doing this and we're doing this. And that was the end of the legislation.

For those who haven't read the story, whichever one should. The vice president's disagreement, you said, was was clear with moving forward on the strike because you quoted him as saying, I'm not sure the president is aware how this how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There's a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices.

I'm willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But he was arguing for delaying these strikes. Yeah.

Well, what's interesting is that he's arguing. He's saying that he would keep those concerns to himself, but he's basically just told the entire cabinet that he disagrees with the president's decision. And not only that, that he doesn't think the president understands.

That's pretty heavy, doesn't think the president understands the consequences and ramifications. That was very revealing and interesting. I would say.

Yes. I found the the policy dialog, very, very interesting to read. And you can see the different strains of thought in this administration.

Ultimately, they came into line and, and they launched the attack.