The editor in chief of Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, joined ABC News Live to discuss the moment when he realized that he had been added to a group of signal group with the senior government officials who discussed an American attack against Houthis in Yemen.
“My reaction was, I think I discovered a mass security violation in the United States National Security System,” Goldberg told Lensey Davis Prime on Monday.
This occurs after the White House confirmed on Monday that the chat of the group of signals that inadvertently included Goldberg “seems to be authentic.”
“It is almost automatically true that if the Atlantic chief editor has access to this type of information, weapons and packages and weather systems in Yemen and all kinds of information about the sequencing of private events, then obviously there is a security violation,” Goldberg told Davis.
The editor in chief of Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, joined ABC News Live to discuss the moment when he realized that he had been added to a group of signal group with the senior government officials who discussed an American attack against Houthis in Yemen.
ABC News Live
Goldberg said that he initially thought it could have been a “parody” or “deception”, but that “it became somewhat overwhelmingly clear to me that this was a real group” once the attack occurred.
He said he retired from the chat and “is no longer aware of what, if something is happening in the chat.”
The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegesh, talks to journalists at the Pearl Harbor-Hickam joint base in Oahu, Hawaii, March 24, 2025.
Pool
“I saw that this Yemen operation from an initial end to an end, and that was enough for me to learn that there is something wrong in the system here that would allow this information to approach the open, to nature,” he said.
The spokesman for the White House National Security Council, Brian Hughes, shared with ABC News the statement he provided to the Atlantic confirming the veracity of a chat of a signal group, which Goldberg said he seemed to include the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, vice president JD Vance, the National Security Advisor of the White House, Mike Waltz, and the Secretary of State Framework, among others.
“At this time, the thread of the message that was reported seems to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain. The thread is a demonstration of the deep and reflective political coordination between the high officials. The current success of Operation Hutí demonstrates that there were no threats to our service services or our national security,” Hughes said in the statement.
This image taken from the video provided by the US Navy shows an airplane that is thrown from the USS Harry S. Truman in the Red Sea before air attacks in Sanaa, Yemen, on March 15, 2025.
AP
Hegseth denied how the story was characterized and said: “No one was sending text messages to war plans.”
“I have heard how it was characterized. Nobody was sending text messages to war plans, and that is all I have to say about that,” Hegesh told journalists on Monday.
Following the surface of the signal chat, the main Democrats have requested an investigation into the incident.
“The filtration of confidential national security information by the Trump administration in an unqualified system is completely outrageous and surprises the conscience,” said the leader of the representatives’s minority, Hakeem Jeffries, in a statement.
