This week, top Trump officials inadvertently shared secret U.S. military plans with a prominent journalist after mistakenly adding him to a group chat.The journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, who is editor in chief at The Atlantic, discusses what he was thinking as he read the messages and what he makes of the fallout.Guest: Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief at The Atlantic.Background reading: Read Mr. Goldberg’s piece in The Atlantic about being added to the group chat.Read more about Mr. Goldberg, the editor mistakenly added to the Signal chat.Here’s the leaked chat, annotated.President Trump has downplayed the leak and pointed the finger at Mr. Goldberg.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Why is Sabrina leaving The Daily?
Hey everybody, it's Sabrina. It's been a little while, I know, and that's because after three years of hosting this show with Michael, I'm leaving the job as host. I've decided to return to my first love, reporting. It was a really hard decision for me. As you know, this is a very special show, and I'm really proud of the work I did on it.
I said reporting was my first love, but you, our dear listeners, and the amazing thing that is this show, is my other one. I always loved hearing from you, knowing you were out there. So, as you've probably noticed, there's been some new voices on the show as we figure out who's going to permanently step in. And don't be surprised if I come back to visit, as a guest or even to sit in as host.
Okay, here's today's show.
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams. This is The Daily. It's being called a reckless and devastating breach of national security. Revelations that top Trump officials inadvertently shared secret U.S. military plans with a prominent journalist by mistakenly adding him to a group chat.
Chapter 2: How did Jeffrey Goldberg receive secret military plans?
Today, Atlantic Magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg explains how he initially thought the messages were a scam. And now, what he makes of the enormous fallout since going public. It's Wednesday, March 26th. Jeffrey, is that you?
Yeah, it's me.
Well, hello, Jeffrey. You've had quite a week. It's only Tuesday morning.
Yeah, tell me what we're doing.
Okay.
What is this for?
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Chapter 3: What was Jeffrey Goldberg's initial reaction to the messages?
So I'm with The Daily. My name is Rachel Abrams.
Oh, The Daily. Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little podcast in the New York Times.
Local newspaper in New York.
Yeah, yeah. No, we're just starting out, so thanks for bearing with us.
No, that's great. It's cool. So do you have a lot of listeners?
Yeah, we have a decent amount. My mom, my dad.
My mom. And my mom.
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Chapter 4: Who was involved in the accidental group chat?
Jeffrey and I talked on Tuesday morning. It was a full day after a story came out about how he'd been added accidentally to a group chat with top Trump administration officials. So, Jeffrey, we have never met before, but yesterday I think I texted you, I emailed you, I called you, I called your publicist. I was desperate to get you on the show to talk about your story and the reaction to it.
Should have tried Signal.
Should have tried Signal, that's right. So, as we're hinting at, you just wrote something that really everybody is talking about. So tell us, where does the story begin?
Well, the story begins in earnest about March 11th. I received a message request on Signal from someone identified as Michael Waltz. He's the National Security Advisor of the United States.
Signal, the secure messaging app.
Yeah, the commercial, non-government, end-to-end encrypted app that a lot of people in journalism and outside of journalism use because it's allegedly safer. And I don't know Waltz. I've met him a couple of times. But it struck me as unusual because I have a somewhat contentious relationship with the Trump administration, or more to the point, with Trump.
But certainly in the normal bandwidth of Washington experience for a magazine editor who covers politics and foreign policy and national security to get a message request from the national security advisor, if it was indeed him, I accepted the request, forgot about it. A couple of days later, I'm... included in a group called the Houthi PC Small Group.
Can you translate that for us? You have deep experience in foreign policy as a journalist, as you've said. What does Houthi's PC Small Group mean to you in this moment?
Houthis are obviously the Iran-backed terrorist organization that runs part of Yemen and been obviously attacking shipping, attacking Israel for the last year and a half, becoming quite a menace to international shipping. PC stands for Principals Committee, meaning that small group of principals, cabinet members, people who run intelligence agencies.
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Chapter 5: How did Jeffrey Goldberg verify the legitimacy of the messages?
What if?
I mean, let's be honest. You know, you become a journalist because the most interesting place on the planet is the other side of a closed door, right?
Right, right.
So I've got to watch it one way or the other, you know?
So what do they start discussing?
Well, the first text in this chain is from Michael Waltz saying that he's setting up this discussion group. This is on a Thursday, I guess, for basically, you know, we're heading into this weekend. There's this sort of elliptical promise of something happening over the next 72 hours. And the Michael Waltz username asks these other principals to give their weekend POC, point of contact,
in case there's a reason to have a further discussion. And so one after another, six or seven people respond, Marco Rubio, or the person playing Marco Rubio responds with a name from somebody from the State Department and so on, the Defense Department, et cetera.
And most interesting in this moment to me is that the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, names a person and says, this person is going to be representing the CIA in this conversation. Now, what I learned over time is that the person he names is an active CIA officer whose name has never been discussed in public. I thought, what? Like, this is really weird. What is happening here?
But that's the initial foray. And then the next day, there's a really interesting substantive policy debate about whether the U.S. should ramp up its military activities against the Houthis in Yemen. And there's a lot of criticism in the chain of the Biden administration's inability to get the Houthi situation under control.
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Chapter 6: What actions did Jeffrey Goldberg take following the incident?
Like actual military planning that is a settled business and about to happen.
A forthcoming attack on Yemen. I'm also sitting there in my car. It's 1144 a.m. Eastern Time. I get this text. The text promises that the effects of the first wave of attacks will be felt in Yemen at 1345, 1.45 p.m. Eastern Time. So it's two hours, right? And I'm thinking to myself, hmm, well, I guess in two hours I'm going to find out if this is a real chain or not, right? Definitively.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, I basically just kind of sit there and at 1.55 or so, I go into Twitter and I, you know, put Yemen in the search bar. And then sure enough, there are bombs falling all over Yemen just as the user identified as Pete Hegseth promised two hours earlier.
breaking news overseas right now, where officials are confirming that U.S. air and naval assets hit dozens of Houthi targets in Yemen, including missiles, radar, drones, and air defense systems.
These are the most significant airstrikes since President Trump returned to the White House and the first time U.S. jets have struck these Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen since President Trump returned to the White House.
Trump announced the strikes on social media, threatening the Houthi rebels with, quote, overwhelming lethal force. The U.S. says it will keep attacking targets in Yemen until the Houthis stop their assault on global shipping in the Red Sea.
I want you to describe to us what you're seeing in this group chat after the attacks start.
It's a couple of updates on... The consequences of the attack, that's all I'll say. The damage that they think that they have done, combined with some, you know, congratulatory texts. And this is, of course, where they start using emojis.
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Chapter 7: What was the fallout of the accidental leak?
We'll be right back.
Mr. President, your reaction to the story of the Atlantic that said that some of your top cabinet officials and aides have been discussing very sensitive material through Signal and it included an Atlantic report. What is your response to that?
I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of the Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business.
You're talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.
I just can't, to this moment, get over the idea that during the days that group was going on, not one of the participants said, we shouldn't be doing this on Signal.
Do you believe that this warrants a congressional investigation?
Well, it will. Common sense says this was a major screw-up, and somebody should be held accountable. Clearly, I think the administration has acknowledged it was a mistake, and they'll tighten up and make sure it doesn't happen again.
I don't know what else you can say about that. Should Mike Wilson accept being disciplined?
No.
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Chapter 8: How did President Trump respond to the leak?
And in this particular scenario, this particular attack on the Houthis, if a foreign adversary had gotten this information that you saw, what is the worst case scenario? Like, can you just play out the possibilities a little bit?
If somehow the Houthis understood that American warplanes were heading in their direction, that would give them conceivably more time to prepare a response, which would obviously put the pilots of those planes in danger. You're the National Security Advisor of the United States. You're the CIA director. You don't want your target...
in Yemen to know that in an hour or so, he's going to get blown up. So, yes, like if you put this stuff out in the wild and signal and you're not talking about this in a secure way, face-to-face... theoretically, the danger level goes up. I mean, this is so obvious to me, like logic dictates this.
Yeah, I just don't want to breeze over it. I want to make it really clear for people that the reason that it is important for the government to take all of these precautions and conceal these types of plans is that this information getting out there could compromise a military mission. It could put military service members at risk.
At greater risk, right, greater risk.
Those are the stakes here.
Well, also the success and failure of your mission, right?
Right, of course. And because these are the stakes, did they break any laws here? Like, we're talking about sort of how things are typically done, but did the existence of this group chat adding you, was any of this illegal?
I can't answer that question. I'm not a national security lawyer. We've interviewed national security lawyers who say that there are various risks associated with doing this the way they did it. That will be discovered in the fullness of time. And there's a lot of chatter right now in military forums and government forums of people who are saying, I'm an army captain in the artillery, right?
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