Goldberg's Big Get
On Monday morning, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, sat in his office surrounded by a group of top editors and writers, all gathered around one of the biggest and most bizarre national security scoops in recent memory. Hours earlier, Goldberg had received confirmation from the National Security Council that a Signal group chat he was inexplicably added to—one that included some of the country’s highest-ranking defense and national security officials—was real. More astonishingly, the messages he had received included confidential U.S. military strike plans against the Houthis in Yemen, which had been carried out on March 15.
Among the members of the chat were Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—along with other top-level figures. In other words, the highest echelon of the Trump administration’s national security leadership.
When Goldberg was first added to the Signal chain two weeks ago, he was incredulous. “It didn’t seem plausible to me,” he candidly told me Monday evening. Shane Harris, The Atlantic’s national security reporter who was brought in early on the story, also shared that view initially, Goldberg said. But by Monday morning, after the NSC confirmed the conversation was authentic, there was not a shred of doubt left. The reporting checked out. The story was airtight. And so, just after 12pm ET, Goldberg published. Within moments, the internet lit up. The piece dominated the day’s news cycle, reverberating through newsrooms, briefing rooms, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, and the White House. By the evening, millions of people had read the shocking story, Goldberg told me. He wouldn’t get into granular details around the traffic and subscription surge from the exposé, but said it generated “very large numbers, especially in this algorithmically hostile environment.”
In the piece, Goldberg offered extraordinary detail about the text chain he found himself in by happenstance. But the moment I finished reading, several questions still lingered. Why had he opted to leave the group chat? What happened to the phone that now contained some of America’s war secrets? Did he still have the raw intelligence that had been delivered to him or had he destroyed it? When I asked him directly, Goldberg…
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