Call it the first gift to the Democratic Party by the Trump administration after the first 70 days of relatively smooth sailing and chalking up win after win since taking office.
The gift? A stunning report in the Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg after he was accidentally added to a Signal chat regarding an attack of an Iranian-backed terrorist group in Yemen.
The Houthis had been attacking U.S. ships and other merchant vessels in the Red Sea throughout much of the Biden administration and into the Trump administration. They’ve killed U.S. service members while altering critical shipping routes, leading to delays and, ultimately, higher prices of goods worldwide.
National security adviser Michael Waltz then put together a group chat on an encrypted app called Signal. Whether Waltz himself put together the chat and maintained the invite list is unclear (midlevel managers have assistants who take care of these things in the corporate world). Many of President Donald Trump’s top Cabinet members were invited to the discussion, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, among others.
Goldberg, a vehement anti-Trump editor for a vehemently anti-Trump magazine, received what’s called a connection request from Waltz, indicating the two hadn’t spoken before on this particular app. From there, Goldberg was privy to plans of attacks on the Houthis set to launch on March 15 but did not report on his unintended access until after the fact.
Goldberg, in a piece published Monday, claimed that “war plans” were included in the discussion. He has since posted a screenshot of what Hegseth sent, which includes which assets would be launched for attack at what times. In the wrong hands, this information could put American lives at risk. The fact that any reporter or editor was accidentally invited to a discussion like this is patently careless and embarrassing. No amount of spin changes that.
It is certain Trump was not pleased about the incident after a string of favorable news cycles around dropping gas and grocery prices. Last week, two stranded astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of America to much fanfare, thanks to the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Then, there were the U.S. missions against the Houthis themselves, which were and continue to be enormously successful, while Trump showed a clear commitment to differ from Team Biden’s limp responses and to get important shipping lanes open again.
The Signal fumble is overshadowing everything, at least for now. But the feeling here is that this story will largely be gone by the end of the week. Here are a few reasons why:
We live in a world that requires instant communication. Some of the aforementioned members of the Trump Cabinet were in several different places where a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, was not available. Vance was traveling to Michigan for an economic event, while Ukraine envoy Steve Witkoff, who was also in the chat, was in Moscow.
Note: SCIFs are bulky and inconvenient. Communication and chats by an app like Signal are infinitely more convenient (almost too convenient). Here’s betting that Biden administration officials also used Signal to hold chats like this since the Signal app was installed on devices and agency computers when Trump officials took office, meaning it was already being used.
Messages referenced in Goldberg’s piece also show Trump Cabinet members talking about switching to what are called “high side” classified systems, showing they knew the difference between an unclassified chat and secure communication for more sensitive content.
To be clear, this is not a justification for what happened. It cannot occur again, and it would be career suicide for anyone who initiated or joined a chat like this.
But apparently, Signal use among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle is common. Here’s the new AOC, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), talking about Signal just this past weekend during a speech in Washington, D.C.:
“We have all these Signal chats,” she said before the Goldberg story broke. “If you don’t have Signal, get on Signal, OK? Do not trust — get on Signal!”
Here’s another reason why the legs on this story may not be what Democrats hope they’ll be:
James Comey.
It was Comey in 2016, just a few months before Election Day, who provided a get-out-of-jail-free card for this behavior when he didn’t prosecute Hillary Clinton for her highly classified emails sitting on an unsecured server while secretary of state.
Once that decision by the FBI director was made, all bets were off moving forward. It served as a permission slip that these actions were wrong, sure, but merely a light-slap-on-the-wrist wrong.
By the way, the same people screaming for Trump officials to resign also excused Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents by leaving them next to his Corvette in a garage at one of his Delaware homes.
Sit this one out, folks. The selective outrage is obvious.
Now, all of that said, if the shoes were on other feet and this happened with Kamala Harris as vice president, Tony Blinken as secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan as national security adviser holding a chat in such a manner, Republicans would surely be demanding resignations as well … that’s just the way it works now.
And that’s the point: When Democrats complained that egg and grocery prices were too high under Trump just days after he took office, it had zero punch because they excused the same thing under Biden.
So when Democrats, CNN, and MSNBC pundits lecture about the importance of national security, it falls almost completely on deaf ears after so many defended the Afghanistan withdrawal that saw 13 U.S. service members killed, which resulted in exactly zero firings and no accountability.
Excusing an open border that has allowed hundreds, if not thousands, of terrorists into the country also doesn’t help their argument now.
For his part, Trump has stuck by Waltz so far.
“I don’t think he should apologize,” the president said. “I think he’s doing his best. It’s equipment and technology that’s not perfect.”
“And, probably, he won’t be using it again, at least not in the very near future,” he added.
One gets the feeling, however, that if anything like this happens again, there won’t be a third strike for Waltz.
Finally, there is Goldberg’s past work that needs to be highlighted when it comes to credibility.
In 2018, Goldberg wrote an Atlantic piece titled, “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’”
“The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades,” he added, citing “multiple sources” who predictably all stayed anonymous.
The story came after poor weather canceled both a flight and a ceremony at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery outside of Paris. But Trump didn’t refuse anything. A total of 21 members of his team, including then-national security adviser John Bolton, went on the record to deny Trump ever made such a rancid comment while pointing to weather conditions for canceling the event, something Trump had no say in on foreign soil.
“I don’t know who told the author that, but that was false,” Bolton said at the time.
“What animal would say such a thing?” Trump asked in response to the story.
In 2024, not long before the election, Goldberg, again through only unnamed sources, wrote a piece claiming Trump, during his first term, had become angry over a $60,000 bill received for Texas soldier Vanessa Guillen because of her ethnicity.
“It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f***ing Mexican,” Goldberg alleges Trump said in December 2020. “Don’t pay it!”
Mayra Guillen, Vanessa’s sister, posted on X to slam Goldberg, accusing him of exploiting her death for political purposes while criticizing the report.
“I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics- hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members,” she replied to the Atlantic’s X feed. “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.”
“My sister’s death was never to be politicized,” she added. “Unbelievable.”
You followed that correctly: Goldberg claims that four years after the alleged funeral payment refusal happened, “sources” suddenly came to him, and only him right before the 2024 election, and relayed what they say Trump said.
Uh-huh …
We talk about stories that move the needle in politics all the time.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE SIGNAL MESS
This is not one of those times … thanks to precedent, hypocrisy, partisanship, and a journalist who was shown not to be trusted.
Oh, and most importantly, thanks to a successful military campaign against a terrorist organization that has received a free pass for far too long.
