The Bulwark Podcast
S2 Ep1007: Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Wehner: What's Going on with Our National Security?
Tue, 25 Mar 2025
Senior members of Trump's Cabinet got caught sharing attack plans—down to details of who they were planning to kill, and with what kind of weapons, while also wishing Godspeed to our soldiers—and now they'll say anything to get out of the jam they put themselves in. Also, JD Vance openly questioned the judgement of the president in front of those very senior Cabinet members. Meanwhile, vengeance has long been a defining feature of Trump, but the habits of his heart have also infected his supporters. And they've become a moral freak show cheering on deportations of families and starving Africans. Jeff Goldberg and Pete Wehner join Tim Miller. show notes Jeff's original scoop on getting texted war plans (gifted) Pete's piece on Trump's insatiable appetite for revenge Trump's 1992 interview with Charlie Rose
Chapter 1: How did Jeffrey Goldberg receive the Trump team's war plans?
I'm good. Thanks for having me.
I guess my first note here on the outline is, holy fuck. I want to know, just talk us through, you do this a little bit in the story, but where were you when the signal message from Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, came through and walked me through how you kind of processed what was happening as he invited the entire National Security Team onto the group text with you? Yeah.
Quite randomly, I was in Salzburg, Austria. Let's put that aside.
Das 60.
Jahrhundert von The Sound of Music, das ist alles, was ich sagen kann. Aber ich war in Salzburg, er hat mich eingeladen, mit ihm zu sprechen. Ich habe ihn, glaube ich, zweimal in meinem Leben getroffen, nicht letztes Jahr, wahrscheinlich ein paar Jahre zuvor.
Aber es hat mich nicht als verrückt, ich bin der National-Security-Advisor, ich bin der Editor von einem Magazin, ich lese über National-Security. Wir stimmen wahrscheinlich auch auf viele Dinge zu. Zumindest alle, Mike. Ja. Yeah, well, that's the issue. Marco too, right?
You know, I assume that things that come over the transom are fake, but there's no harm in saying to Mike Waltz, yeah, sure, here's my, I accept your message request and I'll find out if it's the real Mike Waltz or not. That happens. A couple of days later, I'm added to the Signal Chat Houthi PC small group with a bunch of names, most of which are spelled out. Some are not.
Some are just initials, but, you know, including the CIA director, the Das ist ein Fake. 100%. Because that doesn't happen. Somebody's setting me up. Well, couldn't you just check to see if it was Mike Waltz's phone number? Like, don't you have his phone? No, I don't want to press any buttons.
Right.
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Chapter 2: What was Jeffrey Goldberg's initial reaction to the security breach?
very easily, from my limited skills here, very easily see what's going on. Or if the person in the group is not in your phone book, then you can't see who it is. Anyway, I just thought of some weird thing. I get a lot of weird things over the transom, as do you, every day. It's like, alright, we're moving on. And then, over the next couple of days, it gets very, very strange.
First, there's a, with a high degree of you know, very similar to, there's a discussion about attacking Yemen and whether they should attack Yemen this weekend. You know, this is already late in the week. And I'm like, well, some AI is very clever at mimicking the policy positions or the ideological proclivities of J.D. Vance. That's interesting. Because J.D.
was the one that was against in the text chain. J.D. was the one who articulated, and by the way, I find this fascinating, and this is the stuff that interests me the most. I find it fascinating that J.D. Vance ist im Chat. Nicht nur sagt er, dass er mit dem Präsidenten entgegenkommt, aber er denkt nicht, dass der Präsident die Veränderungen der Politik versteht. Das ist interessant.
Nun, es ist berühmt.
Ich dachte, das war auch interessant. Trump versteht das nicht. Er sagt das in einer Schale mit 18 Leuten und dem Editor von The Atlantic.
Das ist, wo es ein bisschen blöd ist, richtig? Ich meine, er sagt es in einer Schale, die die Hälfte des Kabinetts inkludiert. Ich bin exagerierend, aber nur ein bisschen. Vielleicht 30 Prozent des Kabinetts. Includiert, übrigens, die größten Kabinettsdepartementen, die Staatssekretärin, die Defense, die Treasury.
are in there and he's like I don't think the president really gets what's going on here and he's making strong arguments that this is just we're just doing Europe another favor and screw the Europeans and it's interesting a conversation that's ostensibly about whether we start dropping serious bombs on the Houthis becomes more animated on the question of how bad the Europeans are really bad or super bad
You know, and that's where it goes. That's the Friday, but on Saturday... Loathes. Hex has said he loathes our Europeans. Yeah, no, and they did it all caps. Europeans are pathetic, all caps, whatever. I mean, they're all sort of mimicking each other and mimicking the boss in that sense. Saturday is when it becomes obviously totally bizarre, and I realize that I'm in something that
As much as I enjoy national security investigative reporting, I don't need strike plans two hours before a launch. That should not be coming into my phone. I mean, I take this stuff very, very seriously and I take the responsibility not to get Americans killed very, very seriously. And I'm sitting in a Safeway parking lot and my phone contains now information that
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Chapter 3: What is the White House's response to the alleged security breach?
I can't get into it. I don't. Es gibt nationalen Verteidigungsinformationen, es gibt Klassifikationen. Schau, es ist offensichtlich Material. Es gibt einen Covert CIA-Operator, der auf dem Thread genannt wird, richtig?
Also, ich meine, das ist klassifiziert.
Ja, und ich habe ihren Namen von diesem, sie haben jemanden genannt, der ein aktiver CIA-Officer ist, in diesem Thread, der auf Signal ist, wiederum eine kommerzielle App, in der ich schaue. Und ich habe es enthüllt. Ich habe es nicht in die Geschichte gelegt, weil sie unter Cover ist. Aber, ich meine, der CIA-Direktor hat es in den Chat gelegt.
Aber das ist klar klassifizierte Informationen, die CIA-Operationen. Bei jedem Standard der Vorstellung, ich meine, wir sprechen über, wiederum, diese sind technische Termine, und es gibt viele, viele verschiedene Läufe und Komplexitäten. Und ich bin kein Nationalverwaltungslehrer. Aber, schau, ich habe das seit mehr als 30 Jahren gemacht.
Ich weiß, was technische, technische Informationen aussehen.
Okay, that's all I'm going to say. So let's go to that National Security Lawyer question then. Because now the Secretary of Defense and the White House Press Secretary have said you're lying, have said there are no war plans there, have said there's no classified information. So the obvious question is, shouldn't you now demonstrate it? Shouldn't you publish the text? No, because they're wrong.
I don't know.
Wow. Well, you want to become my lawyer? I'm just, I'm throwing this out there, Jeff. I don't know. I mean, look, the White House Press Secretary an hour ago said you're lying.
Look, I feel like, let me just put it this way. My colleagues and I and the people who are giving us advice on this have some interesting conversations to have about this. But just because they're irresponsible with material doesn't mean that I'm going to be irresponsible with this material. And you know what? Du hattest eine lange Geschichte, wie ich, mit ihnen zu handeln.
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Chapter 4: How serious is the mishandling of sensitive security information?
I mean, there's some 3D chess kind of thinking going on around this, which I find obviously amusing. Look, you know, here's the thing. You know, obviously, it's a very relatable screw-up. Right? We've all sent texts to the wrong people. And there is something to be said for a White House just saying, oh, yeah, looks like we screwed that up.
Yeah.
Ich möchte nur auf eine Weise aufmerksam machen, weil ich das in einer anderen Interview gesehen habe. Du hast gesagt, was, wenn sie einen Houthi auf den Weg bringen? Und auf irgendeinem Niveau klingt das verrückt, bis du es so denkst. Ich meine, die Sekretärin der Verteidigung hat dich als einen bescheidenen und hochdiskreditierten Journalisten genannt. Die Präsidenten haben dich gegriffen.
Und auf irgendeinem Niveau haben sie einen Adversarier auf unseren Angriff gelegt. Ich meine, sie nennen dich den Feind der Menschen. Du bist ein Adversarier.
Ja, aber ich mag die Houthis nicht so sehr, wie sie die Houthis nicht mögen. um you know here's the thing they're using an unclassified messaging system to share very sensitive information they mistakenly invited the editor of the atlantic under the thing just say i guess we screwed up trying to learn from it we'll do better next time I'm all for that. Everybody makes mistakes.
I mean, most of us don't invite people to the PC small group. We just sort of invite them to a party that they shouldn't have been to. But I get that. But just deal with the reality of it, especially since they've taken such strong positions on classification and on the use of unauthorized servers as a famous example. But Das ist das, was ich nicht verstehe. Just deal with it.
Well, they're liars, Jeff. And they've had a lot of success lying. And so that's why they're lying, I think. I'm just gonna... All right, I accept your expert judgment. All right, so here's the last thing I'm just dying to know, just on a human level. So you're sitting there in the Safeway. You want to see if there's bombing that is actually real.
Had you told other people, like, had you told your wife, like, are you carrying this alone?
No, I'm not carrying this alone. I have colleagues and trusted colleagues and advisors who I said, there's this weird thing going. Look, we were all, including my colleague Shane Harris, who's one of the great intelligence reporters, one of the great intel community reporters. Wir waren beide überzeugt, dass das eine elaborate Deception-Kampagne war, eine elaborate Desinformation-Kampagne.
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Chapter 5: What was the reaction to the mishandling within the White House context?
Ich freue mich auf das Podcast-Interview.
All right. Thank you so much, Jeff Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic. What a week. What a two weeks for you, I guess. It was March 11th you were first put on there. I appreciate you coming on the pod this morning. Thank you. Thanks for having me. All right. Up next, Pete Wehner.
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He's a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. He served in the Reagan, Bush and Bush administrations. He's a contributing writer at the New York Times and the Atlantic. His latest piece for the Atlantic is Trump's Appetite for Revenge is Insatiable. It's Pete Wehner. Welcome back to the Pop, Pete. How are you doing? I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me, Tim. It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Well, I just talked to your boss, the big boss of the Atlantic, Jeff Goldberg, about his unbelievable scoop. I'm just kind of wondering what your reaction was as you were seeing that come across the Transom yesterday.
Yeah, I'd say stunning, but not shocked in a certain way. This is an incompetent crew. I think for Trump and his administration, you know, one day it's incompetence, the next day it's maliciousness, the third day it's a combination of both. And I think...
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Chapter 6: How does this incident compare to past political scandals?
It just, it merits covering, which is, you know, the 2016 campaign was so focused on OPSEC, if you will, email security, and CNN put together a little package of the people who were on this signal chain talking about Hillary Clinton. I want to play that for you.
If there was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now. Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton, even though she thinks she is.
Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the espionage act. When you have the Clinton emails, on top of the fact that the sitting president of the United States admitted he had documents in his garage.
They didn't prosecute, they didn't go after these folks. I forgot, Joe Biden got thrown in there too. But again, the whole point of the Clinton scandal was that ostensibly because she had this private server, people, you know, foreign governments could have easier access to sensitive information. The second layer of the scandal was that it protected her from FOIA, right?
That people couldn't, you know, that government records were removed, maybe that shouldn't have been. Both of those things are true in spades here. And this is a commercial app. We're discussing a bombing. And I didn't get into this with Jeff, but on the signal chain, it says the messages are set to disappear. So these are not messages that are being preserved. So anyway, talk about that.
Yeah, I mean, it's rank hypocrisy. We've seen it for so many years that in a sense, as you were suggesting earlier, you've got to shrug your shoulders because we've gotten used to it. I will say this, Tim, when I hear that kind of thing. Es ist für mich eine Art Katz-Scan darüber, wer diese Leute sind und was sie betrifft.
Und was für eine Verbreitung so viel ihrer Leben gewesen sind und in einer Art und Weise, wie viel Verbreitung viele republikanische Politiker A lot of Republican politicians have been. And I'm saying this as somebody who obviously spent my life, you can tell from my biography, in the Republican Party. I entered politics because I had a pretty high view of politics.
I felt like it was a noble profession. I still do. But I had usually given the benefit of the doubt to people who got involved. I thought, well, you know, they're getting involved or they're trying to do the right thing. You know, liberals, conservatives have different views of how to get to the same end. Aber ich denke, die Trump-Ära hat mir ein paar Dinge gezeigt.
Eine ist, dass sie wirklich nicht über die Wahrheit kümmern. Sie kümmern sich nicht wirklich um Prinzipien, sie kümmern sich um ihren Macht. Und so werden all diese Dinge Instrumente für Macht. Das ist, was mit dem moralen Charakter Bill Clinton passiert. Du benutzt einen 2x4-Figur jeden Tag, um ihn über den Kopf zu schlagen, weil er ein Verhältnis mit einem Internen hat.
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