Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief at The Atlantic, joins CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to discuss being mistakenly included with top members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet in a group chat discussing detailed operational plans and other likely highly classified information about US military strikes on Yemen. #CNN #News
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00:00Secretary Hanks sat there saying that nobody was texting war plans, given you were privy
00:05to this group chat. Is that how you saw it? No, that's a lie. He was texting war plans.
00:11He was texting attack plans. When targets were going to be targeted, how they were going to be
00:17targeted, who was at the targets, when the next sequence of attacks were happening. I didn't
00:22publish this and I continue not to publish it because it felt like it was too confidential,
00:28too technical. And I worry, honestly, that sharing that kind of information in public
00:37could endanger American military personnel. But no, they were plans for the attack.
00:43They were texted before the attack. And there were things texted that you viewed as so sensitive,
00:49you did not even publish them in your report today. I made the decision that the technical
00:55aspects of this, including what kinds of weapons packages, the attack sequencing and so on,
01:01that's not necessarily in the public interest. What's in the public interest is that they were
01:04running a war plan on a messaging app and didn't even know who was invited into the conversation.
01:13I mean, it's an obvious, ridiculous security breach. And if you notice, he didn't actually
01:20answer the question. But his attempt at a denial also stood out to me because no one that I talked
01:26to at the White House today argued this or tried to say these were misconstrued or altered or this
01:33is not real. I mean, the National Security Council confirmed the veracity of it. Yeah,
01:38the National Security Council. I asked various officials, including Pete Exet this morning,
01:43for a comment. And the first question I had for everyone, is this real? I wanted to make sure,
01:48obviously, before we go public, and say, are you sure that this is not a disinformation campaign
01:52run by a foreign state, a non-state actor of some sort, trying to target a journalist for reasons I
01:57couldn't explain? And they're like, no, no, this is apparently a real channel. And I appreciate
02:04them telling the truth about that. And we published. Did they seem alarmed when you
02:08reached out for comment? Probably is not the happiest day that they experienced in the White
02:12House so far, but they were professional about it. I thought that as you were kind of walking
02:18through when this began, you weren't even sure if it was real yourself. You thought maybe I'm being
02:23spun or conned or something's happening here. No, until the day that I received the attack plan
02:31from Pete Hegseth at 1144 AM that Saturday, March 15th, and then saw the attack plan said that 1345,
02:38145 PM, Eastern Time, that the first bombs would be dropping in Yemen. Until that moment, until
02:47that period elapsed, the two-hour period between that text and the first bombs being dropped,
02:53I thought it was a hoax. I thought somebody was trying to entrap me. Again, could it have been
02:59a foreign intelligence service? Could it have been a gadfly organization that tries to entrap
03:04journalists, which we know happens? I didn't know what it was or who it was, but what I did know
03:12was that the obvious answer was that this is a real conversation of the national security
03:17leadership of the United States seemed improbable to me because why would they do it on Signal?
03:24Why would they do this on a messaging app? And why would they invite the editor-in-chief of
03:27The Atlantic to watch? And how many people were on this chat? 18. And did any of them at any point
03:34when you were included in here ever raise that question, why are we talking about this over Signal?
03:40Nobody raised the question, why are we talking about this over Signal? And nobody said, hey,
03:44who is JG? Because you show up in a little bubble as your initials. And no one at any point said,
03:51who's JG? And when I withdrew from the group, you formally remove yourself, you hit a button.
03:56It says, JG has removed himself from the group. I assumed that somebody would say, hey, who just
04:03removed himself from the group? Nothing. You didn't hear from Mike Waltz or anyone else after
04:07that? No, no, nothing at all. I mean, it's a level of incuriosity. I guess that's the polite way of
04:16saying it. It's a level of recklessness that I have not seen in many years of reporting on national
04:22security issues. And so you eventually remove yourself from the chat. Once I was sure that it
04:27was real. But after you've seen everything, I mean, you published these messages. I don't know what I
04:31haven't seen since then. But yes, I removed myself and I started writing this story.
04:37That's fair.
04:37In order to expose the security breach.
04:39And some White House reporters today were saying, maybe I would have never removed myself
04:43from that.
04:43You know, these are tough questions. And I can't go into it, all the decision making involved in
04:50this. But I found out what I needed to find out. A, that it was real. And B, that it did represent
05:00the kind of gap, the Mack truck sized gap in their security that I could never have imagined
05:09a White House experiencing.
05:11I mean, because you're a reporter and probably a worse nightmare to have someone included on a
05:16chat. But a foreign adversary or someone who wanted to do real harm to the United States,
05:22I think that's the concern that is so obvious.
05:24Look, I say this only half jokingly. I mean, I'm sitting in a
05:28Safeway parking lot watching my phone, realizing, oh, my God, this might be real.
05:33I think Pete Hegseth just sent this group actual targeting information,
05:39actual sequencing of an attack. And I'm holding on to the phone. I don't want anyone to.
05:44And then I thought to myself, well, I mean, I guess they're lucky they didn't send this to a
05:48Houthi by mistake or to a foreign diplomat or to somebody who would plausibly be in one of their
05:55phones. I guess that counts as a kind of luck. That's why they don't, that's why they're not
06:02supposed to use open source, privately owned messaging services. They're supposed to keep
06:08all those conversations on what they call the high side. That's the classified side,
06:13where only government officials who are cleared to talk about this stuff get to talk about it.
06:17That's why they have that.
06:19You typically can't even download signal to a classified device that like,
06:24that they issue at the Pentagon, for example. Was there anyone in the group chat
06:27who surprised you that you were wondering why would they be included in this conversation?
06:31It was an interesting chat. It wasn't just CIA or intelligence officials, not just defense
06:36officials. The Secretary of State was there. Secretary of Treasury was there. The White
06:40House chief of staff was there. White House political aides like Stephen Miller, I believe,
06:43was there. It was a pretty broad group, given that level that it was at. It was just a kind of an
06:52all-encompassing coordination group for a specific action. I would say, to answer your
07:00question, I've been surprised by most aspects of this story since I first got invited into
07:05the Signal chat.
07:06I mean, what have you heard today? I mean, I was getting blown up about this,
07:10messages of people saying that they couldn't believe what they were reading in your piece.
07:15What did you hear from people today?
07:17That they couldn't believe what they were hearing in the piece. I mean, like I said,
07:22I mean, I'm very interested, obviously, in what the professionals say about this,
07:26professional reporters who cover these issues like I have, people who have been in government.
07:32And, you know, it's a combination of extreme bad luck. How could you possibly invite the
07:38editor of The Atlantic into your chat? What are the chances of that? And also just
07:44a real anxiety and anger, both about the sloppiness. Remember, American service people
07:54were involved directly in this attack. It wasn't just standoff weapons fired from a thousand miles
08:01away. You know, but you can't just put out this kind of information and hope for the best.
08:07The other piece that people are upset about, and there's a lot of military people feel this way,
08:12is like, hey, you know, we have guidelines about how we're supposed to handle
08:17sensitive information. We have to pass tests every year on this. We get punished
08:22if we leave something on a desk. You know, we get punished if we don't put it in a safe.
08:26What's going to happen here? These guys are just chatting. They're sitting,
08:30you know, on the weekends in their homes, at stores, at restaurants, on their phones.
08:36And what's going to happen? You know, they're wondering if there's a couple of,
08:41you know, a double standard. What did you make of the argument that,
08:45which we keep hearing from officials, this revealed the thoughtful and deliberative process
08:49that they went through? Because there was disagreement over how to proceed, which I
08:53want to ask you about in a moment. But what did you make of that saying, this actually just reveals
08:56how this process works? It does. It does. I mean, that was part of the interesting part of the
09:00reporting for me, was that, oh, wow, we just found out that J.D. Vance really disagrees with the
09:06president on this particular issue. J.D. Vance made a compelling argument. Other people countered
09:12the argument. What was really interesting was that the person designated S.M., which I took
09:16to be Stephen Miller, shut down that conversation, said, I heard the president say we're doing this,
09:21and we're doing this. And that was the end of the conversation.
09:24For those who haven't read the story, which everyone should, the vice president's disagreement,
09:28you said, was clear with moving forward on the strike, because you quoted him as saying,
09:32I'm not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on
09:36Europe right now. There's a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices.
09:41I'm willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But he was
09:46arguing for delaying these strikes. Yeah, well, what's interesting is that he's arguing, he's
09:50saying that he would keep those concerns to himself. But he's basically just told the entire
09:54cabinet that he disagrees with the president's decision. And not only that, that he doesn't
10:00think the president understands, that's pretty heavy, doesn't think the president understands
10:05the consequences and ramifications. That was very revealing and interesting. I would say, yes,
10:12I found the policy dialogue very, very interesting to read. And you could see the different strains
10:18of thought in this administration. Ultimately, they came into line and they launched the attack.