Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg suggested Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lied about the severity of an intelligence leak that shocked much of Washington, D.C.
In a Monday night appearance on CNN, Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, discussed his story, in which he revealed he was added to a Signal group chat of top Trump administration officials discussing sensitive plans about a strike on the Houthis. Hegseth, one of the participants in the chat, dismissed concerns Monday evening, saying “war plans” weren’t discussed on the platform. Goldberg disputed his characterization.
HEGSETH DISMISSES LEAKED HOUTHI PLANS AND CONDEMNS JOURNALIST INVOLVED
“No, that‘s a lie,” he said, responding to Hegseth’s comments. “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.”
Goldberg said he purposefully withheld specific information because he felt it was “too confidential” and feared it could endanger American military personnel.
“I made the decision that 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 war plan on a messaging app and didn‘t even know who was invited into the conversation. I mean, it‘s an obvious, ridiculous security breach,” he said.
“If you notice, he didn‘t actually answer the question,” Goldberg added, with the question being, “Can you share how your information about war plans against the Houthis in Yemen were shared with a journalist in the Atlantic and were those details classified?”
Goldberg went on to call the mixup a “level of recklessness that I have not seen in many years of reporting on national security issues.”
The journalist stressed the severity of the situation, saying the officials were lucky he was the one added.
“I guess they’re lucky they didn’t send this to a Houthi by mistake or to a foreign diplomat or to somebody who may plausibly be in one of their phones. I guess that counts as a kind of luck,” he said.
Goldberg also said the chat revealed interesting dynamics within the Trump administration. It notably showed Vice President JD Vance disagreeing with the decision to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen. William Martin, communications director to the vice president, said in a statement that Vance had subsequent conversations with Trump and changed his mind.
“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. 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,” he said.
CONGRESS IRATE OVER ‘ASTONISHING’ NATIONAL SECURITY BREACH
Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were among those present in the sensitive chat.
Congress voiced outrage over the incident, with Democrats and Republicans calling for an investigation.
