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On Friday, the office of Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned defense secretary, put out a memorandum outlining an effort to clamp down on leaks. The impetus for the memo wasn’t specified, but it followed on the heels of a New York Times story alleging that Elon Musk was about to receive a briefing on top-secret US plans for war with China, and came amid other, similar threats from across the Trump administration, as I noted in yesterday’s newsletter. “The use of polygraphs in the execution of this investigation will be in accordance with applicable law and policy,” the memo read, adding that anyone found to have made an “unauthorized disclosure” would be “referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution.” The same day, Hegseth appeared alongside President Trump in the Oval Office to make an announcement about fighter jets. “Under the previous administration, we looked like fools,” Hegseth told assembled reporters. “Not anymore.”
Ten days earlier, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, had received a request to connect on Signal—a publicly available messaging app that is encrypted, but in no way approved for the secure sharing of classified government materials—from someone presenting themselves as “Michael Waltz,” which is the name of Trump’s national security adviser. Goldberg, who is loathed by Trump, initially suspected that “Waltz” might be an impostor seeking to ensnare him into sharing compromising information for the purposes of embarrassing him. Two days later, the account added Goldberg to a group chat, called “Houthi PC small group,” that purported to have been established for the purpose of coordinating US strikes on the Houthis, Iran-aligned rebel militants in Yemen who have attacked Israel and international shipping routes; the other members of the chat appeared to include a bevy of very senior officials, including Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance. “It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting,” Goldberg reflected later, “and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.” He still suspected entrapment, but as messages began to fly, he perceived “a high degree of verisimilitude”; if this was a hoax, “the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.” Eventually, Hegseth shared specific operational details—about targets, weapons, and sequencing—that appeared to match real-life strikes in Yemen shortly thereafter. Waltz responded to the strikes with a string of emojis: a clenched fist, a US flag, fire. Another official sent prayers and a flexed biceps.
The chat, it turned out, was real; it’s unclear how Goldberg came to be added to it, but it seems clear that it was an accident, and that those involved, at minimum, now look like fools. In the Trump era, I’ve often complained that journalists seem to have internalized the Watergate-era cliché that explosive information is typically tightly guarded and must be pried from the gloved hands of secret sources in parking garages, when, in fact, Trump says the quiet part out loud all the time—but this was a step beyond even that, the equivalent of John Mitchell inadvertently mailing Bob Woodward a round-robin headed “DNC burglars small group.” Goldberg, as the saying goes, left the chat and prepared to write a story about it, including by sending requests for comment to those involved; in response, a spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed that the message thread appeared to be authentic and that officials were investigating how Goldberg had been added. Yesterday, The Atlantic pressed publish and the story immediately, in the magazine’s own words, “broke the internet.” Journalists reacted with uniform astonishment. (“This almost reads like a Gawker item from the 2010s,” Clare Malone, who covers the media for The New Yorker, wrote on X, “but…it is very much not.”) Then there were the memes: Goldberg as Big Bird from Sesame Street sitting conspicuously in a formal business meeting; Hegseth as Roman Roy from Succession accidentally sending an explicit image to his dad; Trump greeting the news by telling a reporter, “You’re telling me about it for the first time.”
Actually, that last one wasn’t a meme—Trump really said it when asked about the story at the White House, denying any knowledge of what the reporter was talking about. (The response is also a meme that is widely used to express fake surprise online; it entered currency after Trump said the same thing to a journalist who informed him of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in 2020.) His supposed ignorance didn’t stop him from taking a swipe at The Atlantic, which he described, falsely, as “a magazine that’s going out of business.” (Later, he reposted a Musk repost of a satirical article calling the leak to The Atlantic “genius” since no one reads the magazine.) Hegseth, for his part, attacked Goldberg as “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes” and insisted that “nobody was texting war plans”; responding on CNN, Goldberg called this “a lie.” Some senior Republicans obfuscated, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who said that the portions of the chat published by Goldberg—who reproduced aspects of the deliberations but decided not to publish the sensitive intelligence to which he’d been privy—showed “top-level officials doing their job, doing it well, and executing on a plan with precision.” On Fox, host Will Cain echoed the sentiment, telling viewers that while the sharing of sensitive information with a journalist was concerning, the “bigger takeaway” was the “transparent insight” into official thought processes; read the messages, Cain said, and “I think you’ll come away proud these are the leaders making these decisions in America.” On CNN, the right-wing pundit Scott Jennings said he was shocked, but that the administration had owned up, and that the policy discussion was “thoughtful” and “well executed.”
It is, obviously, risible and grotesquely hypocritical for right-wing politicians and their media boosters to minimize or blur the discussion of sensitive matters outside of secure channels, let alone the inadvertent sharing thereof with a journalist. (CNN went where everyone was thinking and clipped together footage of what various officials in the chat said about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Hegseth: “If this was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now.”) It is, equally obviously, understandable that the story blew up; it raises serious questions not only about security, but the possible violation of records-retention laws—officials are not supposed to use apps like Signal for official business unless they loop in an official government account; per Goldberg, Waltz set some of the messages in the chat to auto-delete—and the flagrant double standard between the conduct of Hegseth et al. and their barbed recent warnings to underlings not to leak to the press. And that is what we are dealing with here. We’re accustomed to thinking of “leaks” as deliberate acts with a normative hue; in the national security realm, in particular, the word can connote courage or treachery, depending on your viewpoint, but is rarely associated with stupidity and incompetence. As Goldberg notes, however, the chat to which he was added “was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.”
All this being said, it wasn’t just right-wing apologists who wanted to shift the focus from the fact of the leak to the chat’s contents. Some journalists suggested that Goldberg was wrong to leave the chat when he did, or at least that he could conceivably have stayed; Astead W. Herndon, a reporter at the New York Times, wrote that the decision demands more explanation, and that he came away from Goldberg’s article “feeling like what we learned feels small compared to what we could’ve.” Others, especially on the left, argued that Goldberg should have published the operational details that he withheld from his story. Ken Klippenstein—an independent journalist who covers national security matters and has previously published documents, like an apparently Iran-hacked dossier on Vance, when major outlets declined to do so (and earned a visit from the FBI for his trouble)—argued on X that if the information in the chat “was safe enough to discuss in text, it’s safe enough to publish.” He expanded in a post on Substack, in which he accused Goldberg of talking more like a Pentagon spokesperson than a journalist in his rationale for leaving out sensitive details. “Asking if a story is in the ‘national security’ interest rather than the public interest turns the media into self-appointed counterintelligence officers,” Klippenstein wrote.
In mainstream-media precincts, it’s fair to say this was not the consensus view, including at both Fox—where at least one journalist, John Roberts, praised Goldberg for acting responsibly—and CNN, whose chief media reporter, Brian Stelter, described Goldberg’s handling of the episode as “patriotic.” Wherever you stand on this question—and I would warn against patriotism as a fail-safe guide to news judgment, while acknowledging Goldberg’s claim that some of the details could have put people in harm’s way and noting that it’s hard to say what extra information he could have published without knowing what the information was—there’s no doubt that the contents of the chat were highly consequential. The exchanges that Goldberg did publish showed Vance and another official privately (or so they thought) expressing skepticism about the need to strike the Houthis, at least right away, and the consistency of the move with Trump’s other geopolitical aims. (“I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vance wrote at one point.) Last night, Goldberg noted to his Atlantic colleague David Graham that it’s “very useful for the public to know that the vice president has a more hands-off approach than other members of the administration.” And he offered an assessment of the messages that, in one respect, didn’t sound so different from that of Johnson or Cain. “The actual conversation that they have is fascinating, and in a certain way impressive,” Goldberg said. “It’s nice to see that they’re disagreeing with one another.”
Whether you agree with striking the Houthis or not, this is clearly a foreign policy matter that demands scrutiny. (The vice president of the United States certainly seems to think so.) And yet, if the specifics were not totally overshadowed in Goldberg’s article itself, it’s fair to say that they did get lost in the resulting media furor (and the flood of memes) and that this is regrettable; as the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor put it, “it’s a bit sad that so many more Americans will have debates about the propriety of a group chat about bombing Yemen than about, well, bombing Yemen.” Again, the existence of the chat and its jaw-dropping road to publication are extremely newsworthy for reasons (including those cited above) that go far beyond performative national security posturing; clearly, this is part of the reason for the overshadowing. But the bombing of Yemen was not exactly a wall-to-wall story before Goldberg’s article came out. Indeed, one could convincingly make the case that there is a consensus in elite media that such developments are the normal course of things—even, perhaps, a rare area in which Trump is a normal president. (Who can forget Trump “becoming president” in his first term only after bombing Syria?) And conflict in Yemen has long been tragically under-covered in US media, as CJR’s Zainab Sultan wrote in 2019.
A Houthi-run health ministry said that the US strikes to which Goldberg was privy killed dozens of people, including women and children. That tally does not appear to have been independently confirmed, but the fighting has certainly continued: Houthi leaders reportedly tried (and failed) to retaliate by hitting a US aircraft carrier in the Red Sea; according to the Associated Press, the US was still striking targets in Yemen as of this morning. On Sunday, Waltz went on CBS and claimed that the strikes have killed the Houthis’ “head missileer” and hit communications nodes and weapon-making facilities, though per the AP, he has not publicly offered further specifics. Some things are only for the group chat. And The Atlantic.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, separate Israeli strikes in Gaza killed two journalists: Hossam Shabat, who had worked for Al Jazeera, and Mohammed Mansour, who worked for a TV channel aligned with Islamic Jihad, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Per CPJ, the strikes hit Shabat’s car and Mansour’s home; the group called for an independent investigation as to whether the strikes were targeted, and for Israel to cease making “unsubstantiated allegations” about members of the press. (Israel put Shabat on a list after accusing him of belonging to a militant group, which he denied.) Shabat had also reported for Drop Site News in the US, and was working on a story when he was killed. Drop Site published it yesterday, along with a statement holding both the Israeli and US governments responsible for his murder.
- Recently, the authorities in Turkey arrested Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul and possible future electoral opponent of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the increasingly authoritarian president, triggering a huge wave of protests; security forces have responded with water cannons, tear gas, and mass arrests, while the government has curbed access to social media and “flooded pro-government news channels with leaks” casting İmamoğlu in a negative light, per the Times. Police have beaten or fired rubber bullets at a number of reporters covering the protests, while a media union said that at least eight journalists were arrested at their homes yesterday. And TV networks covering the protests have been threatened with license revocations.
- CJR’s Lauren Watson spoke with journalists who cover cryptocurrencies to assess the state of that beat and lessons that it might hold for thinking about this moment, with its departure from norms and open grift. The crypto mediasphere “tends to be inhabited by those who believe in the cause; reporters coming from outside, trained in old-school financial journalism, can miss the significance of in-jokes, or overestimate coin values, which are easy to manipulate,” Watson writes. But some “have managed to become immersed in the world of crypto without being swallowed up by it—even if that’s just what those who control much of crypto media would like.”
- In media-business news, Axios reported late last week that Regent, an investment firm that is looking to grow its tech-news portfolio, has acquired TechCrunch from Yahoo. (Alex Wilhelm, a former TechCrunch journalist, shared some thoughts on the deal.) Yesterday, Axios reported separately that the Philadelphia Inquirer is cutting a desk that was focused on covering marginalized communities; ten jobs are reportedly being eliminated. In happier news, The Lever is expanding, including in the audio and newsletter spaces. David Sirota, the site’s founder, credited subscriber growth.
- And Kat Abughazaleh—a former researcher at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, who has also worked for Mother Jones and Zeteo while building a following on TikTok for videos skewering right-wing media and disinformation—is running for Congress, mounting a primary challenge to Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat. (ICYMI, CJR’s Feven Merid interviewed Abughazaleh last year.) In a launch video, she called on Democrats to “grow a fucking spine” and oppose Trump.
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