The Atlantic on Wednesday published the war plans shared in the Signal group chat that the magazine’s editor-in-chief was inadvertently invited to join earlier this month.
Jeffrey Goldberg had previously withheld sharing some of those messages concerning planned military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen over concerns that their content was too sensitive.
The Atlantic claimed the repeated assertions of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that no war plans were discussed in the text thread coupled with the congressional testimony of CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that no classified information was included in the chat were among the factors contributing to their decision.
“The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and [President Donald] Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions,” the article states.
“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.”
The magazine said it reached out to the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Pentagon and the White House prior to publishing the piece to alert officials they were considering releasing the entirety of the messages Goldberg accessed in light of their recent statements.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt eventually wrote back late Tuesday, telling The Atlantic that it opposed their publication.
“This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release,” Leavitt said, according to the outlet.
The Atlantic said it only agreed to leave out the name of Ratcliffe’s chief of staff upon request from the agency.
The now-released operational update Hegseth shared in the group chat on March 15 appeared to include precise timings about when the U.S. F-18 aircraft would launch and then strike the Houthi targets.
Hegseth, who has been sued by a public watchdog group over the scandal, on Tuesday defended his conduct.
“Nobody’s texting war plans,” Hegseth told reporters. “I know exactly what I’m doing, what we’re directing and I’m really proud of what we accomplished — the successful missions that night and going forward.”
In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, national security adviser Mike Waltz, who took responsibility for accidentally adding Goldberg to the Signal group, attacked the journalist, pledging to get to the bottom of how he was invited to join the chat.
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“I know him by his horrible reputation, and he really is the bottom scum of journalists,” Waltz said. “And I know him in the sense that he hates the president, but I don’t text him. He wasn’t on my phone, and we’re going to figure out how this happened.”
Trump has downplayed the severity of the incident, claiming the media and others are making “a big deal out of this because we’ve had two perfect months.”