The Patriot Post® · Team Trump's Signal Snafu

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, is the guy who brought us the bogus story¹ about Donald Trump calling American soldiers “suckers” and “losers” — just in time to help defeat Trump in 2020. In 2023, he warned² that America might not survive a second Trump term. And in 2024, the guy whose boss is Democrat megadonor Laurene Powell teamed up with Kamala Harris to smear Trump with a flimsy story² about his supposed fascist fascination with Adolf Hitler’s generals.

Goldberg relies on anonymous sources to undermine Trump at key moments.

So, when Goldberg broke the news³ yesterday that he had been inadvertently added to a text string with Trump’s national security team, we started wondering if one of those anonymous sources isn’t some deep stater who deliberately included Goldberg.

Maybe it was one of those darn autofill errors we’ve all committed when sending emails or texts. Or maybe it wasn’t.

I hope the White House will find the answer to that question as it investigates exactly how this catastrophically stupid communications error happened. It’s also possible that this early in his term, Trump and his team will circle the wagons.

“On Tuesday, March 11,” Goldberg reports, “I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering.” Waltz is Trump’s national security advisor, though a staffer could have sent the invite on his behalf.

“I had very strong doubts that this text group was real,” Goldberg adds, “because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.”

Goldberg says, “In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group,” including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

He explains that he was newly amazed each passing day by what was discussed over the new thread regarding American military strikes against terrorist Houthis in Yemen. The strikes were a strong move⁴ from Team Trump. Communicating them while a hack journalist was eavesdropping in the thread was not.

Given his history, it would be wise to take Goldberg’s report with a grain of salt. Hegseth certainly did, beginning in the same place I did: “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” who “peddles in garbage,” and he named some specific instances. Then came his denial: “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.”

However, Fox News’s veteran journalist Brit Hume didn’t buy that for a second, saying, “Oh for God’s sake, the administration has already confirmed the authenticity of the message.”

Indeed, the administration is otherwise not denying anything, instead opting for damage control.

I will give Goldberg a little credit. He could have reported everything he received, but he didn’t. There were conversations and details that he declined to make public to protect national security. He didn’t report anything until more than a week after the strikes. He also eventually removed himself from the group, knowing that Waltz at least would be notified. He took the additional step, he says, of contacting Waltz and others about the situation.

On the other hand, he reported more than enough to thoroughly humiliate many people within Trump’s administration. I suspect he did it with a grin, and he’s having a blast making the media rounds to preen over his fortune.

And why not? This was a terrible blunder. Not only did Trump’s team allow an adversarial journalist into the inner circle, but the subject matter was sensitive national security data. Not only did Waltz and others seriously goof, but they deliberately used an app that is not the correct platform for government communications. Not only was the wrong platform used, but Goldberg notes, “Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.”

See updates below.

Does anyone remember Hillary Clinton’s secret and illegal home email server — her grossly negligent handling of classified information, the extreme efforts to wipe the server, and the years spent lying about it?

Yeah, gloating Trump-haters like The Washington Post’s Philip Bump certainly do⁵. He also remembers “how little [Trump] actually cared” about classified information, given his own legal troubles over it.

Some are defending Trump and his team. For example, House Speaker Mike Johnson downplayed the “mistake” and reassured us that “they’ll tighten up and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Others are highly critical. “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels,” noted New York Republican Congressman Mike Lawler, “and certainly not to those without security clearances, including reporters. Period.”

Nebraska Republican Congressman Don Bacon added, “I’ve accidentally sent the wrong person a text. We all have. The unconscionable action was sending this info over non-secure networks.”

Several intelligence leaders are expected to testify⁶ before Congress.

Former Army JAG officer and notorious Trump-hating New York Times columnist David French opines⁷ that if Hegseth “had any honor at all, he would resign.” Why? “He’s just blown his credibility as a military leader.” National Review’s Mark Antonio Wright argues⁸, “Trump should fire Pet Hegseth.”

Others are pointing at Waltz. “It was reckless not to check who was on the thread,” one anonymous “senior administration official” told Politico⁹. “It was reckless to be having that conversation on Signal. You can’t have recklessness as the national security adviser.”

Yet Fox News’s Peter Doocy reported from the White House this morning, “Michael Waltz has no plans to resign [and] President Trump has no plans to fire Waltz for what he sees as a mistake.” Trump also told reporters yesterday that he was hearing about this “for the first time” from them. If that’s true, why didn’t someone fess up sooner? The president shouldn’t be hearing about this from the press. He should have heard it from his own people.

I’ll conclude by noting that Donald Trump was elected to stop the two-tiered justice system and egregious double standards in this country, along with the notorious habit of Joe Biden’s administration to never hold any of its own accountable for anything. Hegseth, Waltz, and Gabbard are among those who’ve loudly condemned¹⁰ the mishandling of classified information and double standards.

“Oops” isn’t going to cut it.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter¹¹.

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Updates follow:

Goldberg clearly set a trap by not producing everything in the first story. As soon as anyone from Team Trump contradicted him, he published the full thread¹². Team Trump is arguing that he oversold what he had — in part because he changed “war plans” in his first title to “attack plans” in his second — but that doesn’t diminish how foolish a mistake it was to add him to this thread.

How did it happen? According to¹³ Trump, “What it was, we believe, is somebody that was on the line with permission, somebody that worked with Mike Waltz at a lower level, had Goldberg’s number or call through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call.” We don’t know that person’s name or if he’s still employed.

Waltz, however, said, “I take full responsibility. I built the group.” He noted that he doesn’t know Goldberg, saying, “I don’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone, and we’re going to figure out how this happened.”

In any case, Waltz told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham that there was “no classified information” in the Signal thread. Gabbard told the Senate yesterday¹⁴, “There was not classified material that was shared in that Signal chat.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe also told the Senate that the conversation “did not include classified information.” He later noted that Hegseth has the “original classification authority.”

Trump was also emphatic: “It wasn’t classified information.”

The thread did, however, contain specific information about when, where, and how the attacks would be carried out. Given the immediate nature of a military strike, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy simply isn’t buying it¹⁵: “I find it very hard to believe the information we are talking about was not classified, probably at a very high level.”

In 2017, The Atlantic called Signal “the gold standard of encrypted messaging,” admitting that staffers for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton used it. Now, Goldberg says, “Experts have repeatedly told us that use of a Signal chat for such sensitive discussions poses a threat to national security.” Which is it?

Regardless, using Signal for discussions about non-classified material and subjects was approved by Trump’s White House counsel, and it’s evidently not unusual to use private-sector options over mostly inferior government products. According to¹⁶ Michael Brendan Dougherty, “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) (part of the Department of Homeland Security) recommended that high-level government officials switch to Signal last year.”

As of Wednesday, March 26, it does not appear that anyone will be fired, though I’ll bet there was an unpleasant conversation or two with the president. American Oversight, a government watchdog group, has filed a lawsuit because of course someone sued. And it was assigned — drumroll please — to Judge James Boasberg.