Atlantic Editor Explains Why He Published Full Transcript From Group Chat Fiasco

On Mar 27, 2025

Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor who was added to a Trump administration group chat planning war strikes in Yemen, said Wednesday that he published the full text transcript to let “readers decide for themselves” how confidential the discussions in the thread really were.

In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Goldberg shared details about The Atlantic’s decision to publish the whole text conversation he became privy to when national security adviser Michael Waltz inadvertently added him to a group chat on Signal with 18 Trump administration officials ― something he first detailed in a bombshell story published Monday.

“We didn’t do this lightly,” Goldberg told MSNBC. “And all yesterday, we were asking our contacts across the administration … since the president has declared this unclassified and … since the head of the CIA said there’s nothing sensitive or nothing classified in these documents, we just want to make sure that you don’t have specific objections to this kind of information … going out in public.”

Goldberg said he agreed to redact one piece of information from the transcript at the CIA’s request. But overall, he and his Atlantic staff decided to publish the texts and let readers come to their own conclusions about the Trump administration’s insistence that Goldberg being in the chat was not a security concern.

“The administration is saying that there’s nothing classified or secret or sensitive in these. So at a certain point, I just felt, you know, let our readers decide for themselves,” he said. “Read these texts that I got sitting in my car on my phone in a Safeway parking lot two hours before the attack launched and you tell me if this seems like good operational security.”

The transcript includes an alarming message in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explains “hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute” what would happen with the strikes in Yemen, Goldberg said. Those strikes were being carried out by a pilot, not “merely drones and cruise missiles,” he added, “possibly endangering the people who work for Pete Hegseth.”

The conversation took place over Signal. The app allows for encrypted messaging but is also an “unsecured commercial app on phones that themselves potentially could be vulnerable,” Goldberg said.

Instead of responding to the situation by saying they’d made a mistake ― “That would have been an easy way to deal with this,” Goldberg said on MSNBC ― Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration have pushed back on the story’s claim that they were discussing “war plans.”

“The Atlantic released the so-called ‘war plans’ and those ‘plans’ include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information,” Hegseth wrote on social media Wednesday. “Those are some really shitty war plans.”

Goldberg laughed off Hegseth’s suggestion.

“If the timing of a combat mission, an imminently launched combat mission is not sensitive government information, I simply don’t know what is,” he said on “Morning Joe.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed Wednesday that The Atlantic was downplaying its initial story by using the phrase “attack plans” in its latest headline, rather than the phrase “war plans” used in Monday’s story.

“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,’” she said on social media. “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

They’re just playing “a semantic game,” Goldberg said.

“It’s not serious. It’s like ― this is national security in the United States. … The administration right now is not engaged in a particularly serious conversation around this.”