The author of the bombshell Atlantic article who shared a firsthand account of being accidentally added to a group chat with senior Trump administration officials discussing sensitive national security matters on Monday blasted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s claim that “nobody was texting war plans.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, in his piece explained that national security adviser Michael Waltz inadvertently invited him to join a group chat on encrypted messaging app Signal earlier this month with 17 members of Trump’s team, including Hegseth.
While a spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed the text thread reported by Goldberg was real, Hegseth took issue with the journalist’s characterization of the messages.
“Nobody was texting war plans,” Hegseth said, looking straight into the camera after landing in Hawaii for an official trip. “That’s all I have to say about that.”
Goldberg disputed Hegseth’s assessment.
“That’s a lie,” he told CNN’s “The Source.” “He was texting war plans. He was texting attack plans.”
While Goldberg shared some of the contents of the group chat in the article, he withheld information shared by Hegseth on March 15 two hours ahead of a planned attack on the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Goldberg wrote that Hegseth’s messages included information “about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” which could have put U.S. military and intelligence personnel in harm’s way had it landed in the hands of U.S. adversaries.
In his remarks to reporters, Hegseth launched a personal attack on Goldberg, calling him a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”
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In response, Goldberg, who expressed his disbelief at the whole episode, accused Hegseth of trying to distract from his reckless behavior.
“The whole thing is just very flummoxing to me, because I haven’t seen this kind of unserious behavior before,” Goldberg told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “The secretary of defense, all due respect, in that presentation seems like a person who’s unserious and is trying to deflect from the fact that he participated in a conversation on an unclassified commercial messaging app that he probably shouldn’t have participated in.”