Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic editor-in-chief whom senior Trump administration officials accidentally added to a Signal group chat about plans for military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth a liar for claiming “nobody was texting war plans.”
“I’ve heard how it was characterized,” Hegseth said about the group chat leak Monday, after he rattled off to reporters several insults toward Goldberg. “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.”
“That’s a lie,” The Atlantic editor responded later that night on CNN’s “The Source with Kaitlan Collins.”
“He was texting war plans. He was texting attack plans — when targets were going to be targeted, how they were going to be targeted, who was at the targets, when the next sequence of attacks were happening,” Goldberg continued.
“And there were things texted that you viewed as so sensitive, you did not even publish them in your report today,” Collins, the show’s host, added.
“I made the decision that the technical aspects of this, including what kinds of weapons packages, the attack sequencing, and so on, that’s not necessarily in the public interest,” Goldberg said. “What’s in the public interest is that they were running a war plan on a messaging app and didn’t even know who was invited into the conversation. I mean, it’s an obvious, ridiculous security breach.”
