On March 24th, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, dropped a bombshell story revealing that top officials from the Trump Administration added him to a group chat. Here’s a TL;DR of the entire story, with plenty of links if you’d like to dig deeper.
Screenshot of the Signal chat, credit Jeffrey Goldberg and Pete
Hegseth.
On March 11th, 2025, Jeffrey Goldberg received a connection request on the messaging app Signal from Michael Waltz, National Security Advisor of the United States. Signal is an open-source, encrypted messaging service that is popular among journalists and those in political spaces. Two days later, on March 13th, Goldberg was invited to a group chat labeled “Houthi PC small group”. This chat included J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Steve Witkoff, Tulsi Gabbard, and more. The next day Goldberg would be privy to debate on the subject, with Vance disagreeing with Trump’s position on the timing of military activity in Yemen and stating “I just hate bailing out Europe again”. On March 15th, Hegseth sent seemingly classified information, detailing operational timing, aircraft and targeting intelligence for forthcoming strikes in Yemen. These strikes were targeted at the Houthis in retaliation for the group’s attacks on American ships in the Red Sea. Goldberg had access to these messages roughly 2 hours before the attacks were to commence, and once he had verified the attacks were real, Goldberg left the group chat. When the story dropped on March 24th, Gabbard and others were already scheduled for hearings in front of congress the following day. The timing of the drop allowed for little time to coordinate messaging, and the hearing was a brutal one. After Gabbard asserted that no information in the group was classified, Goldberg dropped the full logs on March 26th.
The use of unsecured communication channels for discussing classified military operations may violate several federal statutes, including:
US vice-president JD Vance, left, defense secretary Pete Hegseth,
centre, and national security adviser Mike Waltz were all part of the
Signal chat. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
Well, that depends. Despite the severity of the leaks, Trump is standing behind his people. AG Pam Bondi has already been signaling that there will NOT be a criminal investigation into the group chat. Representative Ilhan Omar, a progressive Democrat from Minnesota, is attempting to file articles of impeachment against Hegseth and other officials, though the effort is unlikely to succeed given the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. That being said, polling indicates that the majority of Americans believe this situation is a serious concern and America’s reputation on the world stage continues to be tarnished by Trump’s administration.