Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters Monday that “nobody was texting war plans” following news breaking that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, gained access to a Signal group chat featuring Trump administration officials talking about plans for an attack against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
“Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said outside a plane in Hawaii after being asked about Goldberg’s access to the chat.
Hegseth also called Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”
Goldberg gained access to a group chat featuring Trump administration figures such as Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz in which they talked about plans for an attack against Houthi rebels. The Atlantic journalist detailed his experience as a part of the chat in a Monday report that rattled Washington.
Goldberg said he had doubts originally that the Signal group was real because he did not think “the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans.”
The chat’s existence was confirmed by a spokesperson for the National Security Council, Brian Hughes.
“This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes said previously. “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.”
Multiple Democrats went after Hegseth following the reveal of Goldberg’s breach into the chat.
“There is no world in which this information should have been shared in non-secure channels,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a Marine veteran, said online. “Hegseth is in so far over his head that he is a danger to this country and our men and women in uniform.”
The Hill has reached out to The Atlantic and the White House for comment.
Updated at 8:06 pm EDT.
