Staggering security breach after journalist is included in Trump admin group chat outlining plans to bomb Houthis in Yemen
The Trump administration has been accused of a stunning breach of security after the editor of The Atlantic was included in a group chat with top officials and cabinet secretaries outlining plans to strike the Houthis in Yemen.
Two days before American warplanes struck targets associated with Iran-backed militants who’d been attacking cargo ships and bottlenecking international trade in key sea lanes, White House National Security adviser Mike Waltz appears to have started a group chat to talk about plans for the airstrikes with key officials.
The former Green Beret turned Florida congressman, who resigned in January to serve as President Donald Trump’s top national security aide, used Signal, a common encrypted messaging app, for a group chat with colleagues on the National Security Council’s “Principals Committee.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe all appeared to be part of the group chat. Others seemingly included were Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator, Steve Witkoff, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller.
And somehow, Waltz appears to have added one more person: Jeffrey Goldberg, the veteran journalist who currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic.
In an explosive report, Goldberg reveals how he unwittingly got an inside look at how Trump’s team began outlining their plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen earlier this month on the encrypted app rather than any manner of official communications channels available to top government officials.
According to Goldberg, he received a connection request on Signal from a user called Michael Waltz on March 11, presumably the very same Mike Waltz who serves as Trump’s national security adviser. The journalist wrote in a lengthy piece for The Atlantic that he didn’t assume it was the actual Waltz who sent him the connection request. Someone could have been “masquerading” as the senior Trump administration official to “entrap” Goldberg, the journalist writes.
Accepting the connection request in case it was genuine, Goldberg received an invitation to a group chat on the app two days later, on Thursday, March 13, entitled “Houthi PC small group.”
“Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours,” the user appearing to be Waltz wrote. “My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”
“Pls provide the best staff POC from your team for us to coordinate with over the next couple days and over the weekend. Thx,” he added.
A principles committee is a group of the top national security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and treasury, and the director of the CIA.
Goldberg noted that he had “never heard” of a principles committee meeting “being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
The various officials soon began to send in the names of officials to coordinate with.
“I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans,” Goldberg writes. “I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.”
