The Atlantic on Wednesday published a transcript of text messages showing that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth detailed U.S. military attack plans in Yemen in a Signal group chat that inadvertently included the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.
In an article titled “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal,” Goldberg quoted from texts in which Hegseth specified types of U.S. military aircraft and the timing of recent airstrikes against Houthi militias in Yemen. The texts did not include information about specific targets.
“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package),” one of the texts says, referring to a type of military aircraft. “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME) — also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s).”
Goldberg and Shane Harris, a national security and intelligence reporter at The Atlantic, published the latest article a day after President Donald Trump’s administration attempted to downplay the magazine’s first report about the Signal thread.
Trump, asked about the matter on Tuesday, said: “It wasn’t classified information.” Hegseth, speaking to reporters Monday, said in part: “Nobody was texting war plans.”
In testimony at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe both claimed no classified material was shared in the group chat. Ratcliffe said his “communications … in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
The intelligence officials both testified Tuesday that Hegseth was the “original classifying authority” on the chat.
Goldberg and Harris, in the article published Wednesday, wrote that “statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.”
“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” Goldberg and Harris added.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt forcefully pushed against The Atlantic’s latest report in a post on X, calling the story a “hoax” written by a “Trump-hater.”
When reached for comment, the White House referred NBC News to Leavitt’s post.
The National Security Council said Monday it was reviewing how Goldberg was accidentally added to a group text on Signal, an encrypted messaging platform that is widely believed to be more secure than other commercial texting applications but traditionally hasn’t been used for high-level government communications.
“At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” the National Security Council said in a statement.
Goldberg reported he had been added to a group chat called “Houthi PC small group” on March 13. He described his initial skepticism, recalling that he discussed with colleagues whether the texts were “part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service, or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization” seeking to embarrass journalists.
When the journalist came to believe the chat was authentic, he left. “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,” Goldberg wrote.
The incident has provoked intense criticism from Democratic lawmakers, some of whom have called for the resignations of Hegseth and Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. Goldberg has said a Signal user named “Michael Waltz” added him to the chat in the first place.
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