Atlantic publishes Trump Cabinet group chat messages
(The Hill) -- The Atlantic has published the Signal group chat messages among national security leaders that were inadvertently shared with Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, noting administration officials said Tuesday that they were not classified.
The published chats show the internal discussions Goldberg described in a Monday article, with figures including Vice President JD Vance discussing the merits of an airstrike on Houthi targets in Yemen.
The published chat offers details about the attack that the initial article did not contain, including the specific timeline of the airstrike and what weapons would be used.
President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials have ripped The Atlantic and Goldberg in an effort to discredit their reporting, and in a statement, The Atlantic said it wanted to make public the texts so that people could see them for themselves.
“The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions,” Goldberg and colleague Shane Harris wrote.
Hegseth has denied sharing classified information in the group chat in comments to reporters, and during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the information in the Signal group was not classified.
“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” the journalists from The Atlantic said.
It’s a move that could have consequences for the magazine. While officials repeatedly said Tuesday that the information contained within the chat was not classified, publishing such information could still violate the Espionage Act, which prohibits the release of national defense information.
The Atlantic noted that the White House opposed their publishing of the information.
“As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to the magazine.
“However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release.”
The magazine wrote that Leavitt “did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.”
In a Wednesday morning social media post, Leavitt chastised The Atlantic, noting its headline called the Signal messages an “attack plan” rather than a “war plan” and then criticized Goldberg directly.
“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans.’ This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” she wrote on X.
On Tuesday, Ratcliffe said “no,” he did not agree with Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-Ga.) characterization of the matter as a “huge mistake.”
And he and Gabbard repeatedly said there was no classified information discussed in the chat – though advanced details of a U.S. airstrike are considered highly sensitive.
“Senator, I’ll reiterate that there was no classified material that was shared,” Gabbard told Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.