It’s scandalous but hardly surprising that high-level Trump officials discussed imminent missile strikes over a non-governmental messaging system – Hillary Clinton taught us that top officials often discuss classified material over public channels. The real mystery is why the journalist allowed to eavesdrop on the conversation was a man whose disdain for Trump knows no bounds.
If, for example, a reporter from a conservative new outlet such as The Federalist, or Breitbart or Just the News had been inadvertently invited to a discussion over Signal concerning plans to bomb the Houthi rebels of Yemen, the mistake would be easy to understand. One assumes some of the participants, including Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, feed information to sympathetic news outlets. Mistakes happen.
But, no. The journalist included was a notorious Trump antagonist, Jeffrey Goldberg. As editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Goldberg directs a publication that insistently casts the president as a fascist, racist, know-nothing who poses an existential threat to the Republic. Recent articles about the Trump administration include, “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here,” “Trump Is Nero While Washington Burns,” and “The New Authoritarianism.” While endorsing Hillary Clinton in 2016, the magazine asserted that Trump was “the most ostentatiously unqualified major-party candidate in the 227-year history of the American presidency.”
Goldberg, himself, has advanced this argument through previous “scoops” that are both damning and suspect. Most famously, he was the channel for the claim by Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, that the president had dismissed the American soldiers who valiantly died storming the beaches of Normandy as “suckers” and “losers.” While Kelly stands by his account, many people who were also in the room when Trump allegedly spouted those despicable words in 2018 say it never happened. Trump himself said at the time that, “The Atlantic… is dying, like most magazines, so they make up a fake story in order to gain some relevance. Story already refuted.”
During the 2024 campaign he wrote another widely disputed article claiming that after promising to pay for a fallen soldier’s funeral, Trump became enraged when the bill arrived. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f***ing Mexican!” Goldberg quotes Trump as saying. Not only did the president and the dead man’s sister dispute the story, but other journalists said they had been pitched the tale but turned it down because it didn’t ring true.
Also in the run-up to the 2024 election, Goldberg wrote an essay titled “A Warning,” which claimed, “America survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.”
Goldberg is entitled to his opinions, which echo those of most progressive who write for the legacy media. But inquiring minds want to know how it was that this man, with that record, was the one outsider looped in on a highly secret discussion conducted outside of normal channels.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to suggest that including Goldberg was the vehicle for casting the Trump administration as incompetent and hypocritical – Trump, of course, famously made Hillary’s use of an illegal private server while serving as Secretary of State a main thrust of his 2016 campaign.
Goldberg fingers the perpetrator in his Atlantic article – which, in fairness, is a tremendous scoop that any journalist would have killed for. “On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as [National Security Advisor] Michael Waltz.”
Trump himself has confirmed that someone in Waltz’s office had included Goldberg. “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there,” Trump said. It seems Goldberg’s Signal profile name ‘JG’ uses the same initials as US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
It is worth noting that while some of the 18 participants in the group chat, especially VP Vance, opposed the strike on Houthi rebels that was conducted successfully, Waltz does not appear to have been one of them. As Goldberg notes, Waltz later appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” where he described the strikes as a break from the Biden administration’s weak approach to the rebels who have limited passage through the Red Sea. “These were not kind of pinprick, back-and-forth – what ultimately proved to be feckless attacks,” he said. “This was an overwhelming response that actually targeted multiple Houthi leaders and took them out.”
Even if Goldberg was added by mistake, one wonders how the error was possible. Why would anybody in the Trump administration give him the time of day? Given his history, he only seems useful if one wants to derail the president’s plans. That’s why one of the people on the call, Secretary Hegseth, has allegedly described Goldberg as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist… a guy who peddles garbage.” That statement may be unfair, but it is true that Goldberg is no friend of the administration.
In this highly partisan media environment, it boggles the mind that the legacy media is even fed crumbs by the Trump administration. And yet, every day, the New York Times, the Washington Post and others report inside scoops from what they call highly placed officials. While one hopes the president will demand that his people only use government channels for official business, this episode should alert him to potential enemies within.
J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @jpederzane. RCP ran a version of this column on March 26, 2025.
