Officials deny Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s claim about confidential information.
The national security advisor of the United States added a civilian to a group chat which included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, along with several other major players in the White House. The group chat was created to address several Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, revealing otherwise confidential military information to their civilian fly on the wall. That civilian, as luck would have it, was the editor in chief of media giant The Atlantic.
On Tuesday, March 11, Jeffrey Goldberg received a notification on an encrypted messaging app called Signal. He had been sent a connection request from an account using the name Michael Waltz, who is the current national security advisor under the Trump administration. Goldberg’s first assumption, he writes in an account of the situation, was that the account was an imposter.
“It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them,” writes Goldberg in his article about the experience. Regardless, he chose to accept the request; there was a chance that the real Michael Waltz wanted to reach out, which could have been an invaluable journalistic source.
The following Thursday, two days after the original interaction, Goldberg received a second notification from the Waltz account: an invitation to a group chat by the name of “Houthi PC small group.”
A principals committee, or PC, is a term for a collection of the secretaries of state, defense and treasury, the directors of the CIA, and the directors of the rest of the major defense departments. Goldberg noted in his article that he had never heard of a PC meeting “being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
The Houthis are an extremist Shia organization, backed by Iran and staunchly against Israel and the United States. They are currently in power in Yemen. Between November 2023 and March 2025, the Houthis had made attacks on over 100 commercial ships in the Red Sea, including several US owned vessels. However, they have only sunk two ships, and none of their attacks on American ships have hit. As European and Israeli concern grew around the attacks, the Signal group was created on Thursday “to coordinate on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours,” according to Waltz’s initial message to the chat. The security advisor requested that everyone in the chat nominate someone from their respective departments to work with, adding 18 to the number of people in the chat. None of them noticed Goldberg in the group, quietly observing the coordination of a military attack as it unfolded over the following two days.
The first thing sent in the chat after these nominations came on Friday, at 8:05 a.m., when Waltz asked the group to check their confidential inboxes for instructions from President Trump. Later in the morning, J.D. Vance posited to the group that these orders were “making a mistake,” notably the first time the vice president has been publicly seen disagreeing with Trump. Vance pointed out that any attack – evidently orders for an attack was in the team’s inboxes that morning – would mainly benefit Europe, while having almost no effect on US trade. Others pointed out that there was no great urgency to the situation and Hegseth sympathized with Vance’s complaint. Shortly afterwards, an account named “S M” (believed by Goldberg to be deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller) chimed in, telling the group in no uncertain terms that the Commander-in-Chief wanted to go ahead with whatever plans were in store.
The next day, March 15, the plot thickened; just before noon, Hegseth sent a “TEAM UPDATE.” Goldberg has chosen not to disclose the contents of this update because “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.” This information allegedly included specific locations and plans for attacks in Yemen. Two hours later the attack happened, confirming to Goldberg that the chat was genuine. Several of the members then sent emojis and other celebratory messages in the chat.
This was not the only confidential information Goldberg claims was leaked by the Signal group: when the nominations were made by the heads of the departments for the chat, he says that he chose not to publish the name of the director of the CIA’s nominee because they were an active intelligence agent. These are serious accusations, but the members of the chat have invariably denied that any confidential information was shared. According to several lawyers interviewed by Goldberg and his colleague Shane Harris, the use of Signal to coordinate an attack may be a breach of the Espionage Act. Furthermore, even if no “top secret” information was disclosed, Signal has not been approved to share sensitive government information. Former Director of Litigation of the National Archives and Records Administration Professor Jason R. Baron told Harris that, “Under the records laws applicable to the White House and federal agencies, all government employees are prohibited from using electronic-messaging applications such as Signal for official business, unless those messages are promptly forwarded or copied to an official government account.” Waltz also chose to make messages in the chat self-delete after one or four weeks depending on the message, indicating that he may have known using Signal for the principals’ committee was against national security policy – a theory Goldberg believes is confirmed by Waltz’s message: “we are all clear on OPSEC [Operations Security].”
