The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Our Editor Their War Plans

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Chipotle, for real. On March 15th, the U.S.
began a bombing campaign against Houthi groups in Yemen. A couple of hours before that, our editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, sat in his car in a supermarket parking lot, waiting to see if and when the attack would start.
How he knew about this military campaign is a very weird story. Not long ago, Jeff was added to a text chain of very important people in the administration.
Presumably, he was added to it by accident. I know, it happens to the best of us.
But there was the editor of The Atlantic monitoring the back and forth between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and others, wondering, could this possibly be real? In fact, Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, later confirmed that it was indeed all real.
I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic.
And today, we have on the show Editor--in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg and staff writer Shane Harris, who covers national security, to explain what happened and what it might mean. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Hey, Hannah. Hi, Shane.
Hi. Jeff, on Tuesday, March 11th, you get a signal message from a user identified as Michael Waltz, which is also the name of President Trump's national security advisor.
Where are you when you get this message, and what are you thinking? Weirdly and randomly, I was in Salzburg, Austria, and what I'm thinking is not much because in my line of work, that wouldn't be the craziest thing to happen. Like it could be him.
It could be someone pretending to be him. You're not that fussed.
I am always cautious about people reaching out across social media or messaging apps. I don't assume that they're the person that the name suggests.
But I would have to say that I was glad also and I was hoping that it was the actual Michael Waltz because I'd like to be in regular contact with Michael Waltz for all the obvious journalistic reasons. Right.
So you're like, oh, maybe he has a scoop for me. Yeah.
Okay. So then what happens next? You're going about your life, going about your business, and? And then I get added to a group, a signal group, you know, a text messaging chat group called Huthy PC Small Group.
PC, I know from covering White House issues, you know, Principals Committee, basically the top leaders of cabinet departments generally associated with national security issues. And then a message from Mike Waltz talking about how he's putting together this PC Small Group to talk about the Houthis because something's going to be happening over the next 72 hours.
That's when I sort of think, I mean, honestly, the first thing I thought was I'm really

being spoofed. Like somebody is, this is a hoax.
This is a state or non-state actor, probably

non-state actor looking to entrap, embarrass, whatever word you want to use, a journalist.

Right. So you're on alert.
Like it's a little bit interesting, but also you're on alert. As you know, I'm always on alert.
Yeah. Okay.
Okay. Okay.
Ana, what am I going to tell you? All right. So then, so maybe it's a spoof, maybe it's not.
How does it start to get more real? Like, how does it develop? It gets real in the sense that if somebody's doing a spoof, it's a very, very accurate spoof. What happens is a number of cabinet-level officials start reporting into this chain, giving the names of their deputies or contact people over the weekend when clearly something's going to happen in Yemen.
In retrospect, clearly something's going to happen in Yemen. And that was that for that day.
It was the next day that they start engaging in a policy discussion, really in earnest. And it's, you know, explicated in the story that I wrote.
But that's when I'm sort of thinking to myself, if this is a simulation or this is a fake, someone's going to a huge, huge lens to make it seem real. Because everybody in the chat sounds like the person who they're quote unquote playing.
So I'm, you know, I don't say I'm 50, 50, I'm still 60, 70, you know, 70, 30. This is a fakery because for the simple reason that this is nuts.
I mean, obviously why, why would I be involved in this? I wouldn't even know what to think because, yeah, like we include people on text chains who we shouldn't. Like the mistake seems as implausible as the reality.
Like every version seems implausible. We all make the mistake.
This is why this is so relatable. We all, I'm thinking of Shane and I'm writing to Hana about Shane on assignment or how great Shane is and I type in Shane into the recipient intended recipient because that's the name that's on my mind I don't know what was going on in Mike Waltz's mind or who he was thinking of we're trying to figure that out still trying to figure that out any case, I was added to this group, and it's a misdirected email or text chain that I shouldn't have been on.
But the larger point, and obviously Shane can speak to this, the larger point is that why is this conversation happening out in the open? Now, I know Signal is end-to-end encrypted, but it's a commercial texting service that anyone, not just people with security clearances in the federal government, can join. So that's the essential danger.
And that's, if you want to think about an original sin, the original sin is communicating very sensitive information in a channel where you can mistakenly bring in, I mean, forget the editor of The Atlantic. You could have brought in a Houthi, for all you know.
You could bring in somebody who is actively sympathetic to the Houthis and sharing real-time information with you. That's somewhat appalling.
So Shane, I'm going to ask you about that in a second, but I need one more part of the story before we move on to that. Give me an example of, you said it sounded like them, like if it was a simulation, it was an amazing simulation.
Can you give us an example? Sure. Pete Hexeth writing in all caps about how he finds the Europeans pathetic.
J.D. Vance sounding like a kind of quasi-isolationist, talking about why would we do this sort of thing? Europe doesn't, Europe should take care of this problem.
It's not our problem. Trade

conversations. The most interesting one and the one that I thought, whoa, that really does sound

like the guy. At the end of this chain, Stephen Miller, or I should say SM, a person identified

as SM, comes in and basically shuts the conversation down and said, I heard the president.

He was clear to me. He wants to do this.
It was basically, and obviously this is really interesting, there's a conversation with not only the secretaries of state, treasury, and defense, but the vice president of the United States. And here comes Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff, ostensibly just deputy chief of staff, coming in and saying, everybody, the president spoke.
I heard it. Y'all need to just stop doing what you're doing.
And then everybody kind of gets in line and like, all right, well, I guess we're attacking Yemen. It's so crazy that you're just watching this conversation unfold.
Look, the White House has confirmed that this is an authentic chain, but we're still trying to figure out some aspects of it. I still don't know the identities of one or two people because they had their initials.
So when we talk about them, I'm assuming that SM is Stephen Miller, but I'm not guaranteeing that to you. That's a good example of one person.
On the other hand, obviously the one called Hexeth is Hexeth. So you heard Vance disagree with the president, which almost never happens publicly.
That's interesting. Never.
I mean, to be fair to all vice presidents and president, it never happens in any administration where a vice president is going to go out. And I mean, of course, he didn't go out here.
He thought he was actually it's really it's it's interesting because Vance is saying in the conversation, I don't think the president understands the ramifications of what he's doing. He's saying that to people who work for the president.
It's kind of a bold move to say Trump doesn't understand what's going on. Now, if I'm sort of – this is just speculation.
But if I'm Stephen Miller and I'm reading that and I'm the enforcer, I'm like, okay, thanks, JD. That'll be enough of that.
Right, right, right, right, right. So some of the things are like overheard across the bathroom stall.
You don't hear them in public. Other things are like exactly as you expect.
Right, right, right. Other things are exactly as I expect.
I mean, even later in the story when after the first successful strike on the Houthis in Yemen. And that's when you know this was real.
Well, then I know it's real because I was told beforehand that it was going to happen in my phone. And then two hours later it happens.
That's pretty good proof that, you know, if somebody is spoofing this, then it's not some media gadfly organization. It's a foreign intelligence service that had knowledge of the U.S.
strikes. Seems implausible.
But then the part that really struck me as very Trump administration was the sharing of all these emojis, flag emojis, muscle emojis, fire emojis. Prayer emoji.
Prayer emoji. which, you know, and it's like, by the way,

I mean, it was, talk about relatable.

It's like every workplace, I mean, this is what I actually thought

when I'm seeing this come over the phone,

is, wow, every workplace is the same.

It's like, big victory.

Right.

We got the new, you know, the Dunder Mifflin contract,

and, you know, muscle emoji.

And it's like, here was, you know, we took out some Houthis. Right.
Good work, everybody. Right.
So that's when I thought, wow, these guys are, these could be these guys. Because if I were trying to spoof them, I wouldn't do something so implausible as to start inserting juvenile emojis into a national security conversation.
Unless you were so good. Yeah, no, if I had outfoxed myself, you know, I wouldn't have done that if I were doing a simulation.
One more question about your reality. As all this is happening and you're starting to realize this might be real, are you talking to people about it? Are you in your own reality about it? Are you like, where are you? Well, I'm talking to certain colleagues, including and especially Shane, who's sitting next to me.
Shane, who's been covering the intelligence community for a long while. And, you know, I'm talking to him from the beginning about this because I do need some reverb, some reaction to it because I've never seen this kind of thing or heard of something like this happening.
But when I first showed him just the initial foray, you know, we're having a group, Shane was like, no, no. No? Somebody's trying to, this is an operation.
I don't know who it is. I don't know why they're doing it, but this is an op.
This is a disinformation operation because these guys don't do that. Okay.
Shane, these guys don't do that. Why was that your first thought? What don't they do? I mean, what they do is talk about who we're going to bomb and why should we bomb them.
They don't do it on signal. And it just, I mean, in the initial presentation of this that Jeff gave to me, I thought, well, this sounds crazy.
Why would they be that reckless? Why would the national security advisor set up a group, call it PC Houthi Group, and then start adding these people? And it was actually kind of baffling, too, because, again, if this was a hoax, somebody was going to really great lengths to do it, which could happen.

But I think my –

I mean, you know, sophisticated operations do happen in the intelligence world.

And the question was, of course, like why?

To what end?

So where is this going? And then as it went on, I think it became, like as Jeff said, increasingly clear that the needle was moving quickly towards authentic. But my initial reaction as to why it was probably not real was that I couldn't imagine senior national security officials deciding that it was a good idea to discuss something of this sensitivity where, let's be clear, pilots are in the air.
They could be shot down. People could be killed.
People are going to be killed on the ground. Things are happening very fast.
Why would you not do that in the situation room or in a secure facility? Many of these cabinet officials, by the way, have facilities like that in their house. They can go have those conversations.
Most of the relevant ones, the heads of intelligence agencies, the obviously defense secretary and the like, they have plenty of ways to communicate with each other within a minute or two of needing to. Even those signals encrypted? Yeah.
So the problem is this. There's a couple problems.
One, it's encrypted, but it's never been approved by the government for sharing classified or what's called national defense information. Now, to be clear, we talked to former security officials, former U.S.
officials who said, yeah, we did use Signal in the government. We might use it to transmit sort of certainly unclassified, not sensitive information.
We might talk around something or like notify someone that you're leaving a particular country. But this level of specificity, actual planning for an ongoing operation, the sharing of intelligence and information about strikes, that is clearly not what signal is intended for.
It's very convenient and it is relatively safe. I mean, I know like some officials who've traveled overseas in conflict zones who use it because they're not near a U.S.
embassy, let's say. But it's not meant for this kind of detailed planning, which occurs, as Mr.
Walt said, and the principal's committee level. That is done in the situation room or that's done at their various buildings where these people work.
Just so I'm clear, what level of detail crosses the line? I know you don't want to say what they actually said about the campaign, but what kinds of details, when you saw them, were like, that would never happen? You can't, so details like the number of aircraft that are involved, the kinds of munitions that are being dropped, specific – Times. Times.

That was on the chain?

Specific targets on the ground. You know, intelligence-related matters relating to the strike and to the targets.
Names of individuals who should not – U.S. officials who should not have been put in an unclassified chain because of their status as intelligence officers.
you can kind of like

there's probably six or seven different kinds

of information that are arguably implicated under the rules and the law for how you're supposed to handle this stuff. By the way, a lot of it is just common sense.
I mean, you read something and you could tell the difference between strategic information and tactical information. We should deal with the Houthis.
Fine. We should do X, Y, and Z because the Houthis are a threat to commerce and American national security interests.
This is what we're going to do to the Houthis in two hours is not information that the public should have. I mean, even as a reporter, I say that.
And like, I'm fascinated. I want to

know how they're making decisions, why they're making decisions. I want to know after action,

why things happen, why they went right, why they went wrong, and so on. But I don't want,

and I've been doing this for a while, as has Shane, I don't want information before a kinetic

action, before a strike of some sort, that has to do with the practical aspects of that strike, information that if it got into the wrong hands could actually endanger the lives of Americans. I mean, the North Star for me and Shane and most normal people, normal reporters, is, look, we don't want to endanger the lives of American personnel in the field.
And that's why this was, that's why the Saturday texting, the Saturday chain was very, very different than the Friday because it got very practical. When was the bombing campaign? Saturday the 15th.
The first bombs exploded in Yemen around 1.45 p.m. Eastern time.
I found out at 11.44 Eastern time that it was happening. Got it.
So just so I understand, it's like they're revealing specificity of plans which are about to take place, which could put lives in danger. Okay.
So here's the thing that crossed my mind all throughout this, which is imagine if it weren't me in that chain, but imagine if it were somebody, I mean, this sounds implausible, but it's also implausible to include me in the chain. Imagine it was somebody who was a Houthi.
Or an Iranian diplomat. Or an Iranian diplomat.
Or a diplomat from another country who was a side deal with the Iranians. They literally would have known when things were going to happen.
But I have to say, a journalist is no less dangerous because you could have published those plans. So you're not the best choice either.
Well, I'm the – yes. Of journalists, you're an excellent choice because you're ethical.

I mean a less scrupulous one.

But a less scrupulous journalist. No, no.
I mean I'm sure there are journalists out there who disagree with my view, who take a kind of – I would call it nihilistic view, which is like information is information or we should just put it all out there and damn the torpedoes. I'm not – that's not my thing.
There's another reason why this was so dangerous that doesn't have, doesn't involve mistakenly adding a journalist to the thread.

And that is that while Signal, I mean, you said it's end-to-end encrypted, it's very good and secure that way. That's true.
But the device that it's on, right, is your phone. And while the iOS system is pretty good, nation states – and here I'm talking about China in particular, which, remember, is behind a recent penetration of the telecom networks called Salt Typhoon.
The phone in the pocket of every one of those national security officials must be presumed to be a number one target for a foreign intelligence service. And there are kinds of malware that they could get implanted on that phone.
It could be very expensive, very sophisticated stuff that could allow them to read the messages on the phone as they're being typed. That's why a system like Signal, even though it's good intent encryption, is not approved for sharing classified encryption because it's on your phone, which can be hacked.
Right. So it's obviously sloppy, reckless.
Does it violate any laws? So there are a couple that it might. Conceivably, it could violate the Espionage Act, which despite the name, it's not just about spying.
It's about the handling of what's called national defense information. So if this is considered national defense information, there are provisions of that law governing how you transmit it, who is allowed to have it.

P.S. Someone like Jeff who doesn't have a security clearance, not allowed to have it.
So now these officials made this known to someone who wasn't cleared inadvertently. So that could be a mitigating piece of information.
There's also a provision of the Espionage Act that governs what's called gross negligence? Was it grossly negligent to put it on signal? Was it grossly negligent to add Jeff? The common sense reaction to that might be yes. So that's possible that that could implicate maybe Mike Waltz or Pete Exeth even under the law.
And then there's also the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act. And in this case, I think these text messages are both federal records and presidential records because they're coming out of the White House in some cases.
And the law says – Literally one of the participants is the elected vice president of the United States. And another is the White House national security advisor.
And we quoted an expert in the story, an expert on these laws who said, look, if it's a presidential record, you have to maintain it. And what that means is in this case, a backup of these messages would need to be sent to some kind of government official account.
If they were doing that, then they're complying. But there are also DOD regulations about not putting classified information on an unclassified system, as clearly happened here as well.
So, you've got a couple laws, maybe two or three laws, provisions of those laws and regulations that this activity would seem to violate. Well, Jeff, congratulations.
You're now part of the official Trump record, government official record. Okay, theories.
I know you don't know why this happened. Is there some possibility they wanted you to know?

Have you run that through your head?

Oh, yeah, I ran all the possibilities through my head.

You know, the funny thing is, when they're having their policy conversation, policy disagreements,

I was struck by the sophistication of the argument.

Some were, you know, sort of knee-jerk, anti-Europe kind of, you know, invective that one expects. But they were having a serious conversation about what to do about a challenging problem.
A problem, by the way, they were left with by the Biden administration, which did not handle that situation well or adequately. So they were, this is they inherited, and they're trying to work their way through it.
As they were doing

that, I was thinking to myself, oh, maybe they want me to see this. So I write a story about how

clever they are in dealing with the Houthis. And I thought, that's very kind of a circular way of

getting somebody to write something. My folks could just call you.
He has your number.

They could just call me and say, I'd like to do an interview with you about our Yemen policy. And I'd be like, great, let's do it.
So, I couldn't, I can't, you know, Occam's Razor explains a lot of the world, and the explanation here is that it was heading into the weekend, they were out and about, things were happening in the Middle East that they had to stay in touch with. They have these amazing devices in their pockets like we all do where they can communicate with the world.
They put together a group. They put it together sloppily.
They did it on something that they shouldn't have done, but for convenience. And that's it.
That's what happened. So given that that can happen to the best of us and does happen to all of us all the time, is there anything...
You're always planning the bombings of countries on your phone with your podcast team. I mean like adding the wrong person to a text chain.
So given that that happens to the best of us, can you draw any particular conclusions about the Trump administration? Like, does it reveal anything to you about them that's specific as opposed to just, you know, they're sloppy like the rest of us?

I think there's that aspect too, which I mean, there is a little bit of a who among us, right?

We've all done this.

I mean, not about planning a war, but we know what this is like and how embarrassing and unintentional it can actually be.

But what I do think this shows is a level of recklessness. There's just no world in which a reasonable person serving these positions would think it's okay to discuss this kind of active operation, I think, in this way.
Now, there may be people who would challenge me on that, and there may be people who would say, listen, it's not as bad as it looks. They weren't getting into totally the operational weeds, even though I think they actually were.
You could make excuses for that. But just as a judgment matter, this was a bad one.
It was a bad call, I think, to use signal in this way. It's not approved for this way.
And you can see why it was such a bad call, because a horrible accident like this, from their perspective, can happen. But what I also think it reveals too, and this is important to the policy debate, is there is not agreement in the administration over whether they're doing the right thing with this action.
There is widespread agreement, it seems, that they should make the Europeans try to pay for this military action, because it's mostly European goods that are moving through this part of the world. But when the vice president comes out and says, I disagree, and I don't think that the president understands the implications for this and how it will affect his foreign policy, that's quite striking.
And you see in the messages how they're referring back to previous meetings that they had where it seemed to some people in the room like this issue was settled, but apparently it wasn't. And they go on this kind of extended debate about, well, should we wait a month? And then Stephen Miller, as Jeff said, comes in and says, no, the president said we're doing this.
And so you see that there's not clarity around the president's decision making, around the policy. And that is just to be a fly on the wall for that is extraordinary.
That's very revealing about the policy process in this White House. You mean for such an important decision that there are last minute disagreements that haven't been buttoned up, that haven't been hashed out, that haven't gone through proper channels or, you know, like thoughtfully resolved? I think they were, I mean, apart from the fact that they were doing it on an insecure channel in the presence of the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, apart from those two technical issues, they were having a reasonable conversation that you would expect them to have.
And like I said, I was a little bit heartened that, oh, they actually debate among themselves. They talk about this.
They work through these things. They seem to be, as Shane pointed out, this is obviously the residue from other meetings that were taking place live and in person where they're still working out issues.
What I found maybe just on a personal level or a citizen level disconcerting was when SM, who we assume is Stephen Miller or presume is Stephen Miller, when he comes in and says, no, I didn't hear that. I heard the president say, we're doing it.
Thank you very much. Call it a day.
And then everybody, and then everybody, including the secretary of defense goes, agree. But I have to say, and I want to be very clear here.
When I understood that this was real, I did remove myself from the group and began the process of writing this so that I could make the public aware, our reading public aware, that this government had, let's just say, poor digital hygiene. So it's a very serious thing, and I would rather not be engaged in that kind of text chain.
Well, Jeff, Shane, thank you for joining us today. Thank you.
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