Had the war plans been discussed on a secure government channel a record would have been kept, but Signal offered a way to make it disappear unless someone from outside took screenshots, writes Joe Lauria.
U.S. Navy vessel firing Tomahawk missiles during 2024 airstrikes on Yemen. (U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)
In his article about being invited by U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz to a Signal chat with the U.S. secretaries of state, defense and treasury, the U.S. vice president and the directors of national intelligence and the C.I.A., Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg writes that Waltz set at least some of the text messages in the chat to disappear.
Goldberg wrote:
“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.”
Had the discussion of war plans in Yemen by the principal Trump national security officials been conducted on a secure government channel, such as the National Security Agency runs as part of the Pentagon, a record would have presumably been kept in accordance with the law.
But Signal offered a way to make that record disappear unless someone on the chat made screenshots of it. Goldberg took screenshots of the chat between 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14 and 5.18pm Saturday, some 33 hours later.
Goldberg implies classified information was discussed, which he has not disclosed to the public. “The Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” he writes.
This conflicts with the testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe who told the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday that no classified information was involved. [On Wednesday, The Atlantic published the full transcripts of the Signal chat including military details of the attack.]
Why would Waltz want to use a platform like Signal that allows this high-level chat to disappear? One possible answer is to ask who was not present on the chat: President Donald Trump. If the NSA had run the call, Trump would have access to the chat transcript.
(Also missing from the Signal meeting was the head of the NSA, who would likely have objected to the NSA not facilitating it. With the exception of the individual chat participants, who could have also made screenshots, the government does not have possession of the transcript.)
Asked about the Signal chat on Tuesday, Trump plausibly professed to have known nothing about it.
With Trump absent and no record of the conversation being kept, his top security officials could speak more freely, such as Vice President J.D. Vance, who openly opposed Trump’s desire to bomb the Houthis in Yemen, the subject of the chat. According to Goldberg’s reporting, Vance wrote on Signal:
“I think we are making a mistake. … 3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”
Goldberg then writes:
“The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. ‘I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.’”
There are many more questions than answers at this point about this incident, and we may never get many answers. That leaves mostly speculation.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz (r.) talk to press March 11, 2025 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (State Department/Freddie Everett)
If no record was being kept of what was clearly a strictly off-the-record (if not classified) conversation, why would Waltz have invited Goldberg to participate? What role might he have wanted Goldberg to play? Or was it just a massive screw up by Waltz to invite him?
Goldberg wrote:
“I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, 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.”
According to D.C. journalist Max Blumenthal, Waltz had been a source for Goldberg, who he described as one of the “Beltway media’s top access journalists.” During the run up to the 2003 Gulf War, Goldberg was used by Dick Cheney “to draw a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein,” Blumenthal said. It was a link that didn’t exist. But after planting the story, Cheney then cited Goldberg’s report in The New Yorker as proof.
In his Atlantic article on Tuesday, Goldberg, who is anti-Trump, writes about Waltz:
“I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically.”
Staunchly Pro-Israel
Then Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaking with Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Sept. 28, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (State Department/Chuck Kennedy)
In his youth, Goldberg was an admirer of the Jewish extremist Meir Kahane, some of whose followers are members of the current Israeli government. Living in Israel, Goldberg joined the Israeli Defense Forces, where he became a prison guard monitoring Palestinian prisoners. The Jewish Chronicle says:
“Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked in the campus Hillel kitchen before moving to Israel. He served in the Israel Defence Forces during the First Intifada as a prison guard at Ktzi’ot Prison – an experience he later documented in his 2006 book Prisoners: A Muslim & a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. ”
Bombing Yemen for Israel
The U.S. attacks on the Houthis, which began on March 15, are clearly to the advantage of Israel, but Vance pointed out that the U.S. has virtually no interests in Yemen and little shipping in the Red Sea. The Houthis have only targeted ships bound for Israel to hinder Israel’s murderous assaults on Gaza.
Trump has warned Iran that they could be next if they continue supporting the Houthis on counter attacks against the U.S. in the area. Getting the U.S. to go to war against Iran has been a longstanding, even obsessive goal of Netanyahu’s.
Israeli intelligence would clearly have had an intense interest in this encrypted chat on Signal, which it may have been able to penetrate. Or maybe not.
“Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of ‘national defense’ information,” Goldberg wrote. This is the thinking of a person aligned with the state. It is not normally how a reporter given access to sensitive material thinks.
Ultimately there is only one person who can explain why Goldberg was invited to the chat and that is Waltz. On Wednesday, The Atlantic reported: “Waltz, who invited Goldberg into the Signal chat, said yesterday that he was investigating “how the heck he got into this room.”
On Fox News Wednesday, Waltz said: “I can tell you for 100% I don’t know this guy [Goldberg]. I know him from his horrible reputation and he really is a bottom scum of journalists and I know him in the sense that he hates the president, and I don’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone and we are going to figure out how this happened.”
BREAKING: Mike Waltz announces he spoke with @ElonMusk and said tech experts are going to figure out how The Atlantic’s Jeff Goldberg got into the Signal chat.
“I can tell you for 100%… I don’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone.”pic.twitter.com/ZyAEqawDss
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 26, 2025
Goldberg wrote him to ask why he was invited. This is the answer he got:
“Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded two hours later, confirming the veracity of the Signal group. ‘This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,’ Hughes wrote. ‘The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.'”
In fact, this entire episode might just have been blown way out of proportion. No harm came to U.S. troops. But harm came to 53 Yemeni civilians, killed by American bombs aiming to stop the only people trying to halt the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
That is the part of the story that has truly disappeared.
Cathy Vogan contributed to this article.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
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