But Their Group Chat DMs!

It's hilarious if the subject and individuals involved are not deadly serious

Chatting in the open (Photo Credit: Rod Lamkey Jr../AP)

We all had those moments, accidentally adding somebody else to the group chat and not realizing it, or texting the wrong message to a coworker instead of a friend you wanted to gossip with. But none of this can compare with the bombshell revelation by The Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffery Goldberg, who caught himself in an intimate front-row seat to what goes on behind the scenes.

On March 15, Trump ordered military strikes targeting the Houthi Rebels in Yemen, vowing to use “overwhelming lethal force” to retaliate against the rebel group’s attacks on commercial ships and US forces in the region. The operation killed 31 people, with the Houthis claiming most casualties were women and children.

Most of the world learned about that news between Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning, but Goldberg learned about it two hours in advance.

If you haven’t read Goldberg’s article “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” please do, it is worth the time and a darkly humorous read for some. Plus, it’s a gift link, so enjoy!

Goldberg wrote that he was accidentally added to a Signal (An open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists due to its privacy) group chat by national security advisor Mike Waltz, and the chat included figures such as VP JD Vance and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, among other key administration officials. The author initially thought he was added to the group chat as part of a gotcha scheme to trick him or a disinformation campaign.

After receiving the Waltz text related to the “Houthi PC small group,” I consulted a number of colleagues. We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

When he obtained news that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen two hours before it happened, the validity of the chat became alarmingly real, and he soon left the group chat. When discussing this story with a fellow Atlantic reporter, the editor-in-chief detailed the moment he learned the group chat was legitimate.

It was actually chilling: 11:44 a.m., Saturday the 15th, Eastern Time, in my car in a parking lot, just checking my phone, and I see a text from Pete Hegseth, or somebody who’s hoaxing me as Pete Hegseth. It provides information about upcoming military operations with timings attached: This is going to happen. Then this happens, then this happens, and this happens. I’m sitting there in my car and thinking I’m about to find out if this was an elaborate scam or not. So I thought to myself, I’m sitting here for the next two hours with my hands around my phone. I check on X around 1:55, and yes, Sanaa is being bombed, so then I have the realization that this is almost certainly a real channel and not just an elaborate fakery of some sort. And that’s when I began to realize that I had to write about this massive security breach.

Among the numerous damning information revealed in the article, the most damning of which was an exchange between JD Vance and Pete Hegseth about Europe, culminating with Vance writing “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” followed by Hegseth replying “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

After the Yemen attack, the Trump team congratulated each other in the group chat, which Goldberg took a screenshot and looked like this.

Goldberg later said the most shocking thing wasn’t just that he was in a group chat that included sensitive military operations, which foreign adversaries could use to cause detrimental harm to the US, “The remarkable thing is that no one in the group asked, Who’s JG?, and when I removed myself from the group, seemingly nobody said, Hey, why did JG leave?”

This isn’t just simple “amateur hour” mistakes, these people are top US government officials deciding where and how to attack foreign adversaries. Suffice to say, there are legal implications here. For one, Waltz may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which deals with handling “national defense” information. Moreover, the use of Signal could be a problem in and of itself. Usually, there are classified and encrypted government platforms for these officials to chat on. Signal shouldn’t be used in the first place!

All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said. Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

As Goldberg observed, Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear between one to four weeks. That leads to issues with whether federal records law is violated since it states text messages about official acts are considered preserved records. Even though some US officials have acknowledged they have passed on unclassified information via Signal, this is the first documented instance where classified information was communicated through the site. It leads to a big question: Did these officials use Signal for convenience or are they doing it to hide something?

Legal issues aside, which nobody believes this Justice Department would conduct investigations into their actions, there is a special layer of schadenfreude and irony to this drama.

Back in 2016, during the run-up to the presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Republicans were laser-focused on Clinton’s private email server. Long story short, even though Clinton’s actions were bad in and of itself, numerous investigations (Many led by Republicans) found there was no illegality involved.

Regardless, many Republicans were outraged by Clinton’s controversy and successfully influenced the electorate to have second doubts about voting for Hillary. The “but her emails” line is now immortalized in American political history. Some of those people include Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio (Who is also on the group chat). The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last did some digging and made this 22-minute-long video, filled with high fructose levels of hypocrisy.

On the international level, it confirms basically what we know about the Trump administration. For America’s European allies (Debatable at this point), their contempt for the NATO alliance and disgust for Europe’s role in American foreign policy is self-evident. For adversaries who see the US as a threat or a challenger, the outcome after reading the Atlantic piece is confirming your original thoughts that people working in the administration are freaking idiots. If you are American or work in the intelligence or military space, this paragraph from Goldberg’s article would horrify you to the core.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

After the article was published, a political firestorm ensued.

Despite an initial denial by Trump, the White House later acknowledged the report “appears to be authentic.” Members of Congress and intelligence officials were stunned by the revelations, with Democratic lawmaker Pat Ryan demanding hearings on the matter, while writing on Twitter (X): “Only one word for this: FUBAR (Fucked up beyond any recognition).” Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson dismissed any potential disciplinary action for Waltz and Hegseth, saying “Apparently an inadvertent phone number made it onto that thread. They’re gonna track that down and make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

When asked by journalists about the text messages hours after the White House confirmed the legitimacy, Hegseth said “Nobody was texting war plans” and called Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Even though it is unlikely anyone would get punished legally over this, Politico reported Waltz’s future was in doubt as administration officials speculated a potential ouster from the president to the recently appointed national security advisor.

I understand there are so many things in the Trump administration that could distract you. From the president hating on a portrait that made him look fat to the FBI opening a Tesla vandalism task force to “tackle domestic terrorism.” But this issue is deadly serious, not only for its national security implications but the political consequences too. The Republicans have been long critics of Hillary Clinton’s actions because they are the strongest defenders of national security. But when they were caught doing something similar, if not worse, they pretended like there was nothing wrong.

Maybe it's not a good idea to talk about blowing people up on a group chat...