Donald Trump installed a former Fox News host with a history of alleged erratic behavior as Secretary of Defense. What could go wrong? Well, we’re barely two months into the president’s term and Pete Hegseth seems to have texted presumably classified plans to bomb Yemen into a group chat that inadvertently included the editor in chief of The Atlantic.
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported on Monday that on March 11 he received a connection request on Signal — an encrypted messaging app — from “Michael Waltz,” later confirmed to be Trump’s national security adviser. Two days later, Goldberg was added to a Signal chat “Houthi PC small group.”
Who belonged to “Houthi PC small group”? Apparently a slew of high-level Trump administration officials including Hegseth, Waltz, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliff, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
What was being discussed in “Houthi PC small group”? The preparations for the Trump administration’s March 15 airstrike campaign against Houthi militants in Yemen. On March 15, two hours before the still-ongoing strikes began, Goldberg received what he described as a lengthy text from Hegseth (although he didn’t realize the chat was real at the time) that “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
Goldberg took it as an opportunity to check if the chat was legit, and not some elaborate ruse targeting a prominent journalist. According to the text, “the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.”
Shortly after the bombing began, members of the group lauded Hegseth in the style of a newly hired accountant who just hit his first quarter metrics, not a man who had just initiated another round of possibly illegal American bombing in a more than decade-long civil war.
“A good start,” “amazing job,” “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Great work all powerful start,” chat members wrote. If it was a soulless corporate office they may have included a notice to please expect a celebratory melon bar at 4:30 p.m. this Friday.
Goldberg noted that Signal is not an approved channel through which government officials can share classified or highly sensitive intelligence.
After he removed himself from the text chain and reached out to the Waltz, National Security Council Spokesperson Brian Hughes told The Atlantic that “this appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
On Monday, when asked about the incident during a press conference, Trump attacked The Atlantic. “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business,” he said. “I don’t know anything about it. You are telling me about it for the first time.”
Ahead of the strikes, several members of the chat expressed disagreement with the president’s desire to launch the strikes this month.
“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices […] There is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.” wrote Vance.
Joe Kent, who has been nominated to head the National Counterterrorism Center, added that “There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line. We’ll have the exact same options in a month.”
In response, Hegseth said that while “waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus,” if they waited and “this leaks, and we look indecisive.”
Well, it did leak, and they don’t look indecisive so much as wholly incompetent.
