The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he was in a Safeway parking lot when he realized a group chat he was added to detailing strikes on Yemen was real.
Goldberg reported Monday that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz appeared to have added him to a group chat titled “Houthi PC small group” on the encrypted messaging app Signal. The thread also appeared to include top White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
At first, Goldberg wasn’t sure if the group chat was real. But soon enough, officials started sending the planned times of U.S. strikes on Yemen — and Goldberg realized they were lining up perfectly.
“I’m sitting in a Safeway parking lot, watching my phone and realizing, ‘Oh my God, this might be real,” Goldberg told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Monday. “I think Pete Hegseth just sent this group actual targeting information, actual sequencing of an attack.”
Goldberg went on to tell MSNBC he was glad someone else wasn’t added to the group chat.
“It’s interesting because as I’m reading it at 11:44 a.m. on Saturday morning, the 15th, seeing that the Houthis are not going to know about this for another couple of hours, and I know about it,” Goldberg said.
“I’m thinking to myself, I mean, honestly, I’m thinking to myself, well, I’m glad that Mike Waltz didn’t invite a Houthi into the group or a Russian spy or an adversary of the United States,” he added.
Collins also asked Goldberg to respond to Hegseth’s claim that “nobody was texting war plans.” Hegseth’s remarks come after National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes already confirmed to The Atlantic that the group chat “appears to be an authentic message chain.”
“No, that’s a lie, he was texting war plans,” Goldberg said of Hegseth’s claim. “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 was happening.”
President Donald Trump at first denied knowing about his national security adviser’s apparent error.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said Monday. “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. It’s to me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine, but I know nothing about it.”
The president went on to defend Waltz in an interview with NBC News on Tuesday, calling the incident “the only glitch in two months” and claiming “it turned out not to be a serious one.”
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump said.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said officials are “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,” she continued. “Terrorists were killed and that’s what matters most to President Trump.”
Both Democrats and Republicans are now calling for action in the wake of the leak.
Pete Buttigieg, who served as Transport Secretary under Joe Biden, called the leak “the highest level of f***up imaginable.”
Republican Representative Don Bacon told Axios: “None of this should have been sent on non-secure systems. Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone.”
