A White House internal investigation into how Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was included in a group chat where top Trump officials were planning an attack on Houthi targets has produced a complicated explanation for the security failure.
According to the report, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, accidentally added Goldberg’s number to his iPhone, thinking he was saving another official’s number.
It’s the process by which Goldberg’s number ended up in Waltz’s phone where things become complicated.
The unlikely series of events reportedly began in October, when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign concerning a story that was running in the Atlantic focused on the then-candidate Trump’s comments about wounded military members.
The campaign disputed the story by including Waltz—who was serving as Trump’s national security surrogate—in the email.
According to three sources familiar with the White House’s investigation who spoke to The Guardian, Goldberg’s email was forwarded to Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the email’s content — including a block of information containing Goldberg’s phone number — into a text message that was then sent to Waltz.
The sources said Waltz never called Goldberg but somehow saved the journalist’s number to his phone and used it as Hughes’s contact number.
The White House insists that Goldberg’s number was erroneously saved through a “contact suggestions update” prompted by Waltz’s iPhone. One source described it as a function in which an iPhone’s algorithm adds previously unknown numbers to an existing contact that it thinks is related—in this case, Hughes.
The White House report goes on to claim that Waltz did not notice the mistake until after Goldberg and the Atlantic publicized the mishap.
Several U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were involved in the group chat. Officials discussed specific Houthi targets, specific military assets that were being used in the attack, and attack times in the chat.
According to sources who spoke to The Guardian, Trump reportedly considered firing Waltz over the incident but decided against it to avoid satisfying the Atlantic by causing the dismissal of one of his top officials just months into his presidency.
In the immediate aftermath, Waltz went on the defensive and claimed that Goldberg’s number was “sucked” into his phone. Fox News host Jesse Watters leaped to play defense for the White House, suggesting that Goldberg inexplicably sent Trump officials his number with a fake name in hopes of gaining some benefit that wasn’t clear after applying any scrutiny to Watters’ conspiracy theory.
The national security boss said he did not know Goldberg, but Goldberg told The Guardian that wasn’t true.
“I’m not going to comment on my relationship with Mike Waltz beyond saying I do know him and have spoken to him,” Goldberg, who is a long-time national security reporter, said.
