President Donald Trump and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended top officials on Tuesday morning after they inadvertently added The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a text chain where they discussed striking Houthi targets last week.
Goldberg published a story on Monday detailing how he was added to a group chat on the unclassified messaging app Signal where Trump officials — including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, among others — were talking through timing and strategy for U.S. military strikes in Yemen against the terrorist group. The White House confirmed the authenticity of the group chat, saying in a statement that it is “reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
While the Trump administration confirmed that the group chat highlighted in The Atlantic’s story was genuine, Leavitt slammed Goldberg’s “sensationalist spin.” The press secretary wrote on X that “No ‘war plans’ were discussed” on the Signal group chat and “No classified material was sent to the thread.”
“The White House Counsel’s Office has provided guidance on a number of different platforms for President Trump’s top officials to communicate as safely and efficiently as possible,” Leavitt added. “As the National Security Council stated, the White House is looking into how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread. Thanks to the strong and decisive leadership of President Trump, and everyone in the group, the Houthi strikes were successful and effective. Terrorists were killed and that’s what matters most to President Trump.”
Goldberg’s number was reportedly added by Waltz or a member of his staff in what was possibly a mixup between Goldberg and Trump trade negotiator, Jamieson Greer, who shares the same initials as The Atlantic editor-in-chief. Trump told NBC News that he remains confident in Waltz’s ability, adding that the National Security Advisor “learned a lesson” and is “a good man.” Trump added that he’s not concerned about the story, saying it is “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.”
In some of the messages published by The Atlantic, Vance expressed concerns about conducting the strikes and said that he was “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,” Vance wrote. “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.”
In a statement on Monday, the administration maintained that the chat showed “the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials,” adding, “The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”
Hegseth responded to questions about The Atlantic story on Monday, calling Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called ‘journalist’ who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the, I don’t know, the hoaxes of ‘Russia, Russia, Russia,’ or the ‘Fine People On Both Sides’ hoax, or the ‘Suckers And Losers’ hoax.’”
“Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that,” Hegseth added.
In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Monday night, Goldberg accused Hegseth of lying.
“He was texting war plans. He was texting attack plans,” Goldberg said. He added that sensitive military information was discussed in the group chat and that he did not publish it in his report.
“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. … And I worry, honestly, that sharing that kind of information in public would endanger American military personnel.”
