The last talking point in the Jeffrey Goldberg Signal scandal died this morning. Readers will recall that, ten days ago, the Atlantic Monthly editor in chief was inexplicably invited onto a private chat between the Trump administration’s national security principals, who were candidly debating the value of strikes upon Yemen’s Houthi terrorists amongst themselves. This chat was held on a private platform, Signal, whose end-to-end encryption may be reasonably tight but whose operational security was clearly not — as evidenced by the fact that Goldberg (much to his own mystification) was present there in the first place.
At some point Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth dropped into the fray to published detailed minutes of the military’s impending strike plan. At that point Goldberg left the chat, realizing he was being inadvertently made privy to highly classified military matters. (Up until this point the possibility had remained that he was the target of an elaborate hoax, the likes of which are not unheard of in this business.) Out of deference to national security, Goldberg declined to quote or transcribe this segment of Hegseth’s revelations. (The military strike, incidentally, was apparently a success.)
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