The Trump administration has been accused of a stunning breach of security after the editor of The Atlantic was included in a group chat with top officials and cabinet secretaries outlining plans to strike the Houthis in Yemen.
Two days before American warplanes struck targets associated with Iran-backed militants who’d been attacking cargo ships and bottlenecking international trade in key sea lanes, White House National Security adviser Mike Waltz appears to have started a group chat to talk about plans for the airstrikes with key officials.
The former Green Beret turned Florida congressman, who resigned in January to serve as President Donald Trump’s top national security aide, used Signal, a common encrypted messaging app, for a group chat with colleagues on the National Security Council’s “Principals Committee.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe all appeared to be part of the group chat. Others seemingly included were Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator, Steve Witkoff, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller.
And somehow, Waltz appears to have added one more person: Jeffrey Goldberg, the veteran journalist who currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic.
In an explosive report, Goldberg reveals how he unwittingly got an inside look at how Trump’s team began outlining their plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen earlier this month on the encrypted app rather than any manner of official communications channels available to top government officials.
According to Goldberg, he received a connection request on Signal from a user called Michael Waltz on March 11, presumably the very same Mike Waltz who serves as Trump’s national security adviser. The journalist wrote in a lengthy piece for The Atlantic that he didn’t assume it was the actual Waltz who sent him the connection request. Someone could have been “masquerading” as the senior Trump administration official to “entrap” Goldberg, the journalist writes.
Accepting the connection request in case it was genuine, Goldberg received an invitation to a group chat on the app two days later, on Thursday, March 13, entitled “Houthi PC small group.”
“Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours,” the user appearing to be Waltz wrote. “My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”
“Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx,” he added.
A principles committee is a group of the top national security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and treasury, and the director of the CIA.
Goldberg noted that he had “never heard” of a principles committee meeting “being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
The various officials soon began to send in the names of officials to coordinate with.
“I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans,” Goldberg writes. “I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.”
On Friday, March 14, a user marked as JD Vance wrote in the group chat that he thought that “we are making a mistake.”
“3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message,” said the user writing under the name of the vice president, according to Goldberg.
“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” they added. “There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”
The poster writing under Waltz’s name noted the limitations of European navies and said it would have to be the U.S. conducting the strikes.
“@Pete Hegseth: if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again,” the account identified as Vance wrote.
Hegseth appeared to agree with Vance, calling “European free-loading” “pathetic.” But he also agreed with Waltz that the U.S. is the only military power capable of such an action.
Goldberg also revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to have texted the group the war plans two hours before the bombs began to fall on March 15, including information about weapons packages, targets, and timing. The journalist did not share the details in his report, citing national security.
However, he said he tracked the actual bombing on social media as it happened and claims that the reported attacks matched up with the discussion in the group chat.
Goldberg said the message in which the ex-Fox News host turned top defense official shared operational details of the upcoming strikes displayed “shocking recklessness.”
The journalist wrote that the strikes on Yemen soon came, as indicated by the messages. According to the Houthi-operated Yemeni health ministry, at least 53 people were killed in the strikes.
Goldberg wrote that he concluded that the chat had been real and that he soon left, but despite a notification being sent to Waltz about his departure, he says he didn’t receive any queries about why he had been a part of the chat or who he was.
“This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes said in a statement shared with The Independent by the White House. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”
“The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” a spokesperson for Vance, William Martin, said in a statement also shared by The White House. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”
Asked about the potential national security breach during a media availability on Monday, Trump denied having knowledge of his national security adviser’s apparent blunder and instead denigrated Goldberg’s publication.
«I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. It’s to me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine, but I know nothing about it,” he said.
The bizarre security breach is not the first time Trump administration officials have had trouble with national defense information.
Trump himself was famously indicted for allegedly unlawfully retaining national defense information after federal investigators found hundreds of classified documents at his Florida home during the period in which he was out of government as a former president. Those charges were dismissed by a Florida judge and the prosecution was ended after Trump won a second term as president last November.
The Signal app is popular with journalists and people looking for a degree of security in their communications, but it is not an approved channel for government communications, and using it could circumvent record-keeping laws because it allows for messages to be deleted after a time period rather than archived as required by law.
The encrypted messaging application is known to be secure enough that the Biden administration encouraged some potential targets of Chinese espionage working for the U.S. government to use the app for personal communications and on non-secure government devices — but not for sensitive communications on national security matters.
National security experts and former intelligence officials who spoke to The Independent in the wake of The Atlantic’s bombshell reporting were flabbergasted by what they described as a stunning lapse in judgment, not just apparently by Waltz — but by every other Trump administration official who appears to have participated in the group chat.
Larry Pfeiffer, an intelligence community veteran who spent 32 years in top roles at the White House, CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency, called the Trump team’s apparent actions “inexcusable.”
“He [Waltz] has at his fingertips, as do all National Security Council principals and deputies, a suite of US government secure communications capabilities. They are available 24/7, home or office, on the road or in the air,” he said.
Pfeiffer also singled out Rubio, the former Florida senator now serving as America’s top diplomat, for having apparently gone along with the use of Signal, citing his service on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — including a multi-year stint as the panel’s chair.
“Rubio, of all of them, should really know better. He ran the Intel Committee in the Senate and would be well versed in CI issues around communications,” he said.
Bradley Moss, a Washington, D.C. attorney with extensive experience in cases dealing with security clearances and national security matters, told The Independent that “time and investigations” would ultimately reveal “exactly how reckless” the discussions in the group chat were.
“It is axiomatic that multiple senior government officials discussing details of military operations on a non-government platform is inappropriate, potentially dangerous to national security, and flirting with defiance of multiple laws,” he added.
Another former Obama administration National Security Council official, Brett Bruen, told The Independent he was shocked by what he called “the collective stupidity of Trump’s National Security leaders.”
“This is protecting highly sensitive information 101 — you do not share it outside of, not just a classified system. This is top secret, specially compartmentalized information. It has no business being on Signal,” he said.
Bruen added that he is “shocked, dismayed and really worried” about the possibility that there are other similar group chats being used by Trump national security officials to discuss similarly sensitive matters, including on China, Iran and Russia — countries that have invested significant resources into espionage against the United States.
“Marco Rubio should have known better. John Radcliffe should have known better,” he said.
“That they were so … sloppy and stupid is not just politically bad, but bad for the safety of our people. It’s really worrying that the leadership of these agencies and of our national security council do not know how to protect themselves, let alone our people, from very dangerous, damaging disclosures.”
The potential security breach was also met with alarm from top congressional leaders who serve on national security-related committees.
Democratic Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said, “I am horrified by reports that our most senior national security officials, including the heads of multiple agencies, shared sensitive and almost certainly classified information via a commercial messaging application, including imminent war plans.”
“If true, these actions are a brazen violation of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans serving in harm’s way,” he added.
The ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rhode Island Democratic Senator Jack Reed, said, “If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen.”
“Military operations need to be handled with utmost discretion, using approved, secure lines of communication, because American lives are on the line,” he added. “The carelessness shown by President Trump’s cabinet is stunning and dangerous. I will be seeking answers from the Administration immediately.”
The Independent has contacted Goldberg for comment. The Pentagon referred back to the National Security Council.
