Atlantic Editor Claims Trump Admin Accidentally Included Him in Yemen Message Chain
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, claimed President Donald Trump’s national security team added him in a Signal message thread regarding their plans for military strikes in Yemen.
So was this an accident or on purpose? Hhhmmm….
The People
On March 11, Goldberg said he received a Signal connection request from a man named Michael Waltz, the same name as Trump’s national security advisor.
Goldberg accepted.
Two days later, Signal alerted Goldberg that someone had added him to the “Houthi PC small group.”
Here’s one message:
A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”The message continued, “Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx.”
Goldberg explained that a principals committee consists of senior national security officials.
The text chain included people identified as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance.
“MAR” (might be Secretary of State Marco Rubio), “TG” (might be Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard), “Scott B” (maybe Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent), and “John Ratcliffe” (possibly the CIA director) also joined the chat.
The chat had a total of 18 people.
Europe
Goldsberg recounted parts of a conversation regarding bailing out Europe, Israel & Gaza, and how to approach the Houthis in Yemen. One part included the person who identified himself as Vance wrote:
“I am not sure the president is aware 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 am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”
Yemen
Then we get to the Yemen plans.
Goldberg did not provide details of the conversation about the Houthi attacks. He did say it included “information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” This is crazy:
At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.
Then, the “Michael Waltz” account gave an update, with the other congratulating the defense team on the attack.
“The Signal chat group, I concluded, was almost certainly real,” wrote Goldberg. “Having come to this realization, one that seemed nearly impossible only hours before, I removed myself from the Signal group, understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, ‘Michael Waltz,’ that I had left.”
Goldberg added: “No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left—or, more to the point, who I was.”
Responses
Goldberg reached out to top national security people on Monday morning:
Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes wrote. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice president is fully aligned with the president. “The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”
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