Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) might be the happiest man in Washington this week. Jeffrey Goldberg’s shocking exposé about his inexplicable inclusion in a Signal chat with 18 senior national security officials has completely overshadowed calls for Schumer to step down from his leadership role in the Democratic Party.
Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and a vocal critic of President Donald Trump, claimed that on March 11, he unexpectedly received a Signal connection request from national security adviser Mike Waltz, which he accepted. Shortly after, he was added to a chat that included Waltz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Vice President JD Vance. The discussion focused on the military strikes against Houthi targets across Yemen.
Goldberg noted that at 11:44 a.m. on Saturday, March 15, he received a message from Hegseth containing “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” Goldberg did not disclose this message in his initial story.
Just two hours later, bombs were falling across Yemen.
Signal is an open-source, encrypted messaging service. Although it’s more secure than most traditional messaging platforms, I was frankly surprised this group was using Signal for their communications.
Democrats and the legacy media were positively apoplectic over the story.
Former Defense Secretary, CIA Director, an early promoter of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, and one of 51 former intelligence community leaders to sign the infamous letter that claimed stories about Hunter Biden bore all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign, Leon Panetta, called it an “act of gross negligence” and said someone should get fired.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) took the cheapest shot of all. He told reporters, “Now the debate among national security professionals is over whether the [Defense] Secretary [Hegseth] was just incompetent or whether he was drunk.”
By Tuesday, Politico was breathlessly telling readers that within the White House, the knives were out for Waltz over “Signalgate” and wondering aloud if he would last the day.
President Donald Trump recognized that while Waltz had made a serious mistake, it was just that, a mistake, and he stood by him. It had not affected the operation, and the entire team took away a valuable lesson, he said.
However one feels about the use of Signal as a form of communication for top national security officials, we discovered this week that its use originated during the Biden administration. At least three people, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), and CNN commentator Scott Jennings, have all attested to this fact.
In sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Ratcliffe said, “So that we’re clear, one of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at, uh, the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers.”
He continued, “Um, one of the things that I was briefed on very early, senator, was by the CIA records management folks about — about the use of Signal as a permissible work use. It is. That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.”
During a Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends, Cotton said, “It is my understanding that the Biden administration authorized Signal as a means of communication that was consistent with presidential record-keeping requirements for its administration — and that continued into the Trump administration.”
On Monday night, Jennings told colleagues, “[T]he Signal program was preloaded on a number of devices and agency computers in this circuit when they got there. So, in their view, it was already in use.”
He noted, “In some of the messages, they talk about needing to go to the high-side computers, which is the classified system. So they clearly knew there was a line on what you could discuss in a chat like this versus a classified system.”
Jennings added there was a “dispute over whether the term ‘war plans’ is being exaggerated.”
Trump administration officials maintain that no classified information was transmitted over Signal. During a Senate hearing on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reiterated this claim, stating that no classified information had been shared in the chat.
On Wednesday, Goldberg published details of Hegseth’s pre-strike message. While the information may not have been classified, it was quite specific — and Democrats have seized on it.
Still, with full Republican control in Washington, the problem is unlikely to gain traction.
However, one pressing question remains: How did Goldberg end up in this group? His inclusion is as absurd as adding Fox News’ Sean Hannity to a chat among high-level Biden administration officials.
As Goldberg noted in his article, he received a connection request from Waltz on March 11 — just four days before the strikes in Yemen. The list was presumably compiled by one of Waltz’s aides, someone who understood the importance of accuracy. Are we to believe they made a random error and inadvertently added a well-known anti-Trump journalist to the group? The chances of that happening are minuscule.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S SIGNAL GROUP CHAT LEAK AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Did someone intentionally add Goldberg to this group? If so, who was responsible? Was it Waltz? Is there an anti-Trumper on Waltz’s staff, or was his Signal account possibly hacked by an outsider?
For every reason, the individual responsible must be identified and held accountable. The Trump administration has no shortage of tech experts on staff. And this is not rocket science.