In March, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, glanced at his phone and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He’d been inadvertently included in a secret chat on Signal among the Trump administration’s national security team about imminent military strikes in Yemen. The Signal chat leaks—which inevitably became known as “Signalgate”—called into question President Donald Trump’s national security team and how it handled top secret information.
Many of those same officials oversaw recent military operations against Iran and its nuclear facilities. Few journalists have seen how the administration operates from the inside out better than Goldberg. He says those Signal chats revealed something about how he believes Trump’s officials view their jobs, especially Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
“I almost felt like, at a very basic level, he was showing off for the vice president, who was also in the chat,” Goldberg says. “The thought I had was, ‘Dude, you don’t have to cosplay being secretary of defense. You are secretary of defense.’” He adds that while it was happening, he didn’t “contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was.”
On this week’s More To The Story, Goldberg sits down with host Al Letson to reflect on the Signal chat leaks, fears of World War III, and what truly worries him about the future of US democracy.
Dig Deeper
Listen: In Fallujah, We Destroyed Parts of Ourselves (Reveal)
Read: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans (The Atlantic)
Read: All the Ways Trump Officials Are Downplaying the “War Plans” Group Chat (Mother Jones)
Read: New Report: Trump Administration Just Got Hit With Another Signal Chat Scandal (Mother Jones)
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn, with help from Steven Rascón, Artis Curiskis, and Julia Haney | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Transcript
More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for More To The Story is the audio.
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | What I saw coming over my phone was to some degree a group of people, mainly Hegseth, cosplaying at running the country and running the national security apparatus of the country. This is why they were sort of putting things in Signal, like, “The bombers leave at whatever.” It’s like, and you know what the thought I had when I was seeing it? The thought I had was, dude, you don’t have to cosplay being Secretary of Defense, you are Secretary of Defense. |
| Al Letson: | You are. Right, exactly. You are. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | We’re good, we’re good. I got it, you’re cool. |
| Al Letson: | As a shaky ceasefire holds between Israel and Iran, I sit down with The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. We discussed the moment he learned he was included in a secret chat about military action in Yemen. His thoughts on the recent US strikes in Iran, and why he believes World War III may have already started. Stay with us. |
| This is More to the Story, I’m Al Letson. Back in March, Jeffrey Goldberg looked at his phone and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Messages from US national security leaders about imminent military strikes in the Middle East. A White House official had inadvertently added The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief to an internal Signal chat. The scandal called into question President Trump’s national security team and how administration officials handle America’s military secrets. Today, many of those same leaders are heading up military operations against Iran. And Jeffrey, more than most journalists, has seen how they make decisions up close. | |
| Jeffrey, thanks so much for joining me today. | |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Thanks for having me on. |
| Al Letson: | So after the US bombed Iran, I’ve seen all over the place that people feel like this could be the beginning of World War III. What are your thoughts? |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Yeah, I see that and I read it. I just, no one’s explained to me how this leads to World War III yet. That is not to say that things can’t spin out of control in the Middle East. The Middle East, the only constant in the Middle East is sudden and dramatic change, so something can go off the rails even as we’re speaking. |
| There’s a larger point, and sorry to give you this lengthy answer, but I actually think that we’re in World War III and we’ve been in World War III since the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. And by that I mean, when you have a situation in which Russia, aided by North Korean troops and Iranian drones and supported diplomatically by China, is invading a neighboring country that is supported by Western Europe and until today at least, the United States, that seems like a low-grade world war. Right? It’s controlled, it’s conventional, it’s mostly done through proxies, at least from the western side it’s done through proxies. But we’re having all of these eruptions all the time now, and the world is not at peace because the major powers are battling it out through proxies and in other ways. | |
| Al Letson: | I think what has been a little bit surprising for me with this new front or change in the Middle East when it comes to Iran and Israel, is seeing that some people on the right are really against American intervention with Iran. And I’m thinking specifically about Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. I saw her saying that she thought that this was going to become a nuclear war. And then you’ve got Tucker Carlson who really grilled Ted Cruz and brought his thoughts to the forefront. I don’t know, I just did not expect to see that happen. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | I’m going to go deep here for a second and I’m going to argue against the idea that Americans don’t like wars. I think Americans are fine with wars as long as they’re short wars that we win. |
| Al Letson: | Agree. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | So I think, look, one of the differences and I just wrote a piece about this. I covered Barack Obama and as foreign policy, national security policy in depth so I know something about that and I know something about Donald Trump. Barack Obama was interesting because he would study the second and third and fourth order consequences of actions America could take, and that would frequently paralyze him into not taking any action. Remember, the Syrian red line controversy is a good example. Donald Trump, I don’t think understands intellectually the idea that there’s consequences to actions, right? And so they’re wildly different. And so when you have somebody like that, like Donald Trump, who doesn’t really ask analytically, what could happen down the road if I do X or Y or Z? You’re really rolling the dice. |
| Al Letson: | I think maybe more than any journalist, you have seen up close the incompetence of the Trump Administration. And obviously- |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. |
| Al Letson: | I don’t know. I mean, you were added to a top secret group chat about a bombing. I think I would stand by my statement just because of that. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Okay, maybe yes, in the sense that it was coming in on my phone. Yes, it was very close. |
| Al Letson: | Yes, I would say that- |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | I was getting a firsthand glimpse. I’m not going to argue the point. |
| Al Letson: | Okay. So with that being said, how much confidence do you have in this team? And I’m talking about Secretary of Defense Hegseth, I’m talking about Trump, I’m talking about all the people that are around these decisions. How confident are you in their ability to execute a plan and to protect American lives? |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | To manage, manage the situation. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, to manage it, yep. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Yeah. I have confidence in, let me put it this way, the general in charge of Central Command, General Kurilla, who oversaw this operation, highly competent. There’s a lot of competent people still in government. I have no confidence in Pete Hegseth’s management or analytic or moral capabilities. Marco Rubio is a mystery to me because I knew Marco Rubio a bit and I was an admirer of his brain and many of his policy ideas and now he’s completely done one of these invasion of the body snatchers things where he’s just whatever Trump says is the thing. |
| Trump himself tweets or Truth Socials or whatever the verb is for posting on Truth Social, a kind of goading text about Russia and its nuclear capabilities. And I worry about Trump’s understanding of the way the national security systems of autocracies work. And I worry that, I mean, it would be the greatest irony of them all, it would be sort of a, that’s a hell of a way to destroy the planet if the planet were eventually destroyed because Donald Trump put something on Truth Social that was misinterpreted by a nuclear armed enemy of the United States who felt as if they had to respond by escalating. | |
| I don’t think Donald Trump wants a nuclear war. Donald Trump has actually been very interesting on the subject of nuclear war and warfare in general. And as you know, he’s not very much into generally speaking into foreign adventures, or at least he’s said as much. I worry that he doesn’t have the self-restraint, maturity, analytic ability, and today the advisors to keep us out of an escalatory cycle with a major power. Iran is a minor power, but I’m talking about China and Russia, North Korea to some extent because they already have nuclear weapons. So that’s what I worry about. You want somebody in that office who’s not impetuous and who is not reactionary. I don’t mean reactionary in the political sense, I mean reactionary in the characterological sense, is easily poked, somebody who’s chill. I mean, if you remember, he was goading the leader of North Korea, this was eight years ago. Little rocket man, and my button is bigger than your button. It’s like, you don’t have to spend years in grad school studying nuclear weapons doctrine to know that ridiculing and threatening people with nuclear weapons is not a great idea. | |
| Al Letson: | No. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | And so if the question is how worried I am that this is the man in charge of our nuclear weapons, and remember, even though we are a democracy, the president of the United States is an absolute nuclear monarch. The president of the United States can use a nuclear weapon when he wants to. So I don’t feel great about the match of the responsibility that the president has and this particular person in the role. |
| Al Letson: | The foreign power that I think about, the conflict that could be coming, I worry a lot about China and Taiwan and how President Trump would respond to any aggression from China towards Taiwan. And I mean, because I don’t know if you can say that this administration has a definable foreign policy, because you can’t really tell what they’re going to do from one day to the next. I wonder, all bets are off the table if China moves in on Taiwan. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Yeah, that’s interesting. By the way, there’s an argument to be made that a president who is unpredictable is useful, in terms of managing adversaries. |
| Al Letson: | Sure. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | It’s known in foreign policy is the crazy Nixon approach. Kissinger would tell the Russian, “Look, I understand what you’re talking about, but my boss, he’s a little bit nuts. We don’t know what he is going to do.” The problem with that is for the crazy Nixon approach to work, the president can’t actually be crazy. |
| Al Letson: | It seems to me that this administration, specifically this president, if you whisper sweet nothing’s in his ear and find a way to get money into his coffers, aggression seems to go away. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Yes, and, I mean, the Iranians didn’t try, to be fair. So, we don’t know. Right, I mean, the joke in the first term or at least the joke that I heard was that either the Trump presidency ends with Trump bombing Iran or building a casino in Tehran. You don’t know, right? You don’t know which way anything’s going to go. |
| On the Taiwan issue, I would ask you what you think because I have no idea of knowing whether when push comes to shove, Donald Trump would go and defend Taiwan or not. He’s a very transactional person. He wants to do business with China on the one hand, he sees China as an adversary, as another. Does he care who runs Taiwan? No. He cares who’s in control of the smooth flow of semiconductors out of Taiwan into American manufacturing facilities. Right? So I don’t know what he would do. On the one hand, he’s transactional quasi isolationist so he doesn’t seem to be the sort of person who’s going to commit US bodies, meaning soldiers, to a fight to defend Taiwan. On the other hand, he’s very reactive, like we were talking. And so maybe he would be like, “China doesn’t get to do that. Only I get to do that sort of thing, so I’m going to go defend Taiwan.” I don’t know. Do you have any insight into it? | |
| Al Letson: | [inaudible 00:12:17]. I have zero insight into it. I think the thing that I think about a lot is that there’s two paths, right? There’s a path that he says, “I don’t really care, as long as we get the superconductors, who cares?” There’s the other path where maybe China has a little bluster in their step and says something like challenging the United States, then anything could happen at that point. So, who knows? |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Yeah, that’s what I mean about someone who is emotions based in these situations. |
| Al Letson: | Right. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | No, I mean, if you’re Taiwan, if you’re Poland, if you’re the Baltic states, you have to be asking, especially with the Europeans because he obviously has a softer spot for Putin than he has for Xi. If you’re the Europeans, you have to say, “I don’t know if this guy’s going to actually come in and save us if we need saving.” |
| But on the particular issue of Hegseth and Signalgate, obviously what I saw coming over my phone was to some degree a group of people, mainly Hegseth, cosplaying at running the country and running the national security apparatus of the country. This is why they were sort of putting things on Signal like, “The bombers leave at whatever.” And you know what the thought I had when I was seeing it? The thought I had was, dude, you don’t have to cosplay being Secretary of Defense. You are Secretary of Defense. | |
| Al Letson: | You are. Right, exactly. You are. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | We’re good, we’re good. We’re good. I got it, you’re cool. You got all the bombers, that’s great. You don’t have to show… I mean, I almost felt like at a very basic level, he was showing off for the vice president, who was also in the chat, and I was like, oh, this is not… You just want people in government, the people who have life-and-death responsibilities to be calm, cool, a lot of cool is necessary, mature, analytic. They don’t take things personally, they’re not getting tattoos to show how cool they are. You want smooth professionals who aren’t looking for glory, they just want to do their job because they believe that they have a responsibility to their country. |
| Al Letson: | Coming up, Jeffrey talks about what this chaotic moment in time means for the country. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | In my mind, we’re either experiencing a midlife crisis, a nervous breakdown, or a terminal illness. I know we’re going through something, we’re going through something. Social media, reality TV before it and the coming AI, it created a situation in which one of these things could happen. I don’t even know if democracy can survive in an age of social media. |
| Al Letson: | The fact that you are listening to this podcast right now tells me that you like deep conversations and also investigative reporting, and Reveal brings you that every week, but we can’t do it alone. We need your help in spreading the word. So please, tell your friends about us. Feel free to give us a rating and review and help others discover the award-winning reporting from Reveal. Okay, more from Jeffrey Goldberg coming up. |
| It’s More to the Story. I’m Al Letson, back with more of my conversation with The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg. Take me back to that moment when you first got the Signal message. Where were you and what did you think when you realized exactly what was happening? | |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Well, I didn’t realize what was happening until it was happening. What happened was I got a connection request from Mike Waltz who, despite what Mike Waltz later said, I do know, I have met, my phone number would be in his phone. That’s not an impossible thing. And so I sort, oh, wow, Mike Waltz wants to chat, I haven’t talked to that guy in a long time. Maybe he wants to open up a channel, that’s great. So I accepted it and then the next day or two days after that, I was added to the, I think PC Houthi Small Group, it was called. And I thought, oh, this is somebody’s punking me. This is obviously some kind of scam. And then it continued in that vein until the actual messages about the bombing started coming in and I thought, well, if this is real, then we’re about to see some bombing in Yemen. And sure enough, it was real. |
| And this is a couple of months ago already, and when I do think about it, it still seems absurd because I was in the middle of this. And it’s not that common, as you know, for a reporter to be part of the story in the way that I became part of that story for a week. So in the middle of that swirl, I didn’t really contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was. What are the chances of that happening, right? And that goes back to your original question, which is, are these guys good at their jobs? In this case, they weren’t very good at their jobs. | |
| Al Letson: | No. Why did you decide to take yourself out of the chat? |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | You are making an assumption that I was making decisions alone. All I can say is that I had a great number of very, very skilled lawyers assisting me through this process because none of them had ever seen anything like this before. And so the prudent course of action was to remove myself from the chat, and obviously we thought that that would trigger… When you leave a Signal chat, the rest of the people on the chat are told that you’ve left the Signal chat. So we were expecting all kinds of high jinks to ensue. They didn’t because it seemed like nobody noticed that I had left the chat. |
| What I would say is, apart from various legal exposures and all the rest, I didn’t want to be in that chat. I have to be honest with you. I want to know as much as I can about the decision-making process and the arguments and the strategy of the United States National Security Complex. I do not as a civilian want to know when the bombers are taking off, from what base they’re taking off, what ships are firing, what missiles at what targets. I don’t want to know. I am not qualified to have that information, I don’t think it’s the place of a journalist to have that. I’m happy to find out later, but I don’t want specific tactical information to be coming to me. And not just because of all the exposure that that would open up, open you up to all kinds of Espionage Act issues. I don’t need to know what kind of gun the soldiers are using. | |
| Al Letson: | Well, it’s also a heavy responsibility, right? I mean- |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | That’s what I mean. It’s not my… that’s not what I- |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, I don’t want to know that. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | I don’t want to know that, and I have no problem with this. I’ve gotten into this argument subsequently. It’s like, what is your role as a journalist in these kind of circumstances? And for some people, for a lot of people, by staying in the chat at all and writing about it, I was a traitor and I was violating something. I don’t know what I was violating. To them I say, “Look, my job is to figure out what powerful people are doing on our behalf.” And so if they wanted to invite me to the chat, I’m in the chat and I’m going to tell the readers of The Atlantic what’s going on. There are some people who’ve said, “You should stay in the chat forever and then report out immediately what they’re attacking.” And it’s like, look, I’m an American journalist, right? I’m a patriotic American, I’m not doing anything. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do anything that endangers the lives of another American. |
| Al Letson: | So, what went into your decision to publish the chat? |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Well, there are two phases. One, I wasn’t going to. A lot of the stuff, as you know, seemed to me to be obviously classified, secret information. What kind of missiles, when they’re going to leave, when they’re going to land, who they’re targeting, etc., etc., etc. What I did with all that information is along with colleagues, we measured the question of publishing, what benefit would become from publishing that specific information and what harm could ensue? So I willingly held back information that I thought was operational because it’s not my interest to provide operational details to stated sworn adversaries of America. And remember, the Houthis’ slogan is, “Death to America, death to the Jews, or whatever.” I’m like all the categories, right? I mean, death to left-handed Yankees fans. I’d be like, oh my God, they really know me. And so, I have no interest in sharing that kind of information. |
| They come out and call me all kinds of names and say that I’m lying and that there was nothing in the chat that was secret. And so they actually kind of weirdly forced my hand. So we spent the day after the first story appeared, vetting again the information that I had that I had not published, and making sure that no American would be harmed by the publication of that information. And then we went to all the different agencies and said, “Look, this is what I’m going to put in The Atlantic tomorrow. If you can make a compelling case why I shouldn’t publish this, make it now.” The CIA came back and asked that we not publish one specific thing about a specific person and I said yes, because my interest is not harming that specific person. Other than that, they were like, “Nope, we’re not raising objections.” So then I published it. | |
| They could have had this become a two-day story by simply saying, and look, this is what an ideal administration or even a normal administration might’ve done. They might have said, “Oh, wow, that was a doozy. We really shouldn’t have been communicating on Signal. From now on we’re not going to communicate on Signal anymore and we’re going to investigate how this happened and investigate how this journalist was brought in.” And for whatever reason, their impulse was to attack me and say that I’m lying and call me a scumbag and call me… I mean, Mike Waltz literally called me a loser. And the funniest part of that is that I didn’t ask you to send me all this stuff. | |
| Al Letson: | Right, you, you added me. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | I was literally, I mean, was literally sitting in a supermarket when I got off. I was shopping and I’m getting all this stuff, and it’s like, well, you could call me a loser but at least I know how to text. |
| Al Letson: | Right, right. I think in normal times though, it wouldn’t just be, we’re not going to use Signal again. It would be, we’re not going to use Signal again and someone’s going to be held accountable. We’re going to fire somebody. And really, that didn’t happen here. This administration just kind of doubled down and said, “Jeff is stupid,” and that’s where it ends, Jeff was stupid. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | No, but here’s a serious thing and anyone who is active-duty military or works in the intelligence community who’s listening to this or any veteran is going to understand what I’m saying immediately. You can get in serious trouble if you’re a soldier for revealing the fact that you’re in a truck moving from X base to Y base, right? You can get into trouble for… The government over classifies, let’s stipulate that, they classify everything. But let’s also stipulate that there’s some stuff that’s worth classifying, making secret. There are so many soldiers who’ve been punished, including jail time, for revealing things that are so much less serious than the stuff that was revealed in the Signal chat. And what I heard from non-political rank and file soldiers, veterans, etc., was, “I would’ve gone to jail for that. These guys don’t even lose a day’s pay, but I would’ve gone to jail.” And that hypocrisy, let’s talk about what leadership is, right? That on the part of Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, etc., that is not modeling good leadership for the people who report to you. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. Are you scared for this country, where we are right now? |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | In my mind, we’re either experiencing a midlife crisis, a nervous breakdown, or a terminal illness. I know we’re going through something. We’re going through something. Social media, reality TV before it and the coming AI, it created a situation in which one of these things could happen. I don’t even know if democracy can survive in an age of social media, that’s a large question for another day. But I literally don’t know if we’re going through a thing where it’s like, all we need to do is buy a sports car and we’re going to be fine, or we just need a little bit of rest and relaxation and maybe some drugs and we’ll be fine, or if the American experiment is under such pressure that maybe it doesn’t make it. |
| I would note, colleague of mine, Yoni Appelbaum has noted this in writing in the past, that there’s never been this sort of experiment before in human history. A large, very large, multi-ethnic democracy has never flourished before over the long term. And I do think that introducing social media and conspiracism and the fakery of AI and all the rest has really affected our ability to keep it together. But I just don’t know. Obviously, I’m hoping for the best. I do think that America’s a great country. I think that we’re an indispensable nation. I think we are a force for good more than we’re a force for bad in the world, especially when you look around the world and see what actually is out there. I’ve got kids, I want them to live in a flourishing country, but I don’t know where we’re at. | |
| I do know this. I do know that passivity in the face of outrage is not going to get us anywhere. And I do know that there are some people who believe that as long as we shovel enough cheap calories at Americans and multifarious forms of entertainment, we’ll keep them quiet and quiescent. And I think that people need to really contemplate what we have and what our system is and think about ways to make it better and not just let it get destroyed by people who don’t care about our democratic experiment. Sorry, I didn’t mean to start giving you- | |
| Al Letson: | No, that was great. That was great. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | … a big speech there, but I really feel this. I feel like there’s a lot of passivity right now about things. |
| Al Letson: | I agree with you. I think passivity, and I think that in a lot of ways, so many things, social media, the media we consume, all of it brings us further away from our humanity. And I think that- |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Look at the way people talk to each other in this country. |
| Al Letson: | Exactly, the way we talk to each other. Also, the fact that we’ve just lost touch with having empathy for people who aren’t in our immediate circle, and- |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Well, this goes to my exact point. It’s like, you know what? You know what I call MAGA supporters? Americans. I want them to call us Americans too. I want people to look at journalists as patriots and not as traitors. I want people to operate within the boundaries of decent behavior and self-restraint, because we’re going to be living here together no matter what, so it might as well work. |
| Al Letson: | And on that note, Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, thank you so much for coming in and talking to me. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Thank you. |
| Is that good? | |
| Al Letson: | That was great. |
| Jeffrey Goldberg: | Did you tape it? Do we have to do it again? |
| Al Letson: | No. |
| That was The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. If you liked this conversation, check out our Reveal episode called In Fallujah, We Destroyed Part of Ourselves. It’s about George W. Bush’s decision to take military action in Iraq and what it meant for the Marines on the front lines. | |
| Lastly, just a reminder, we are listener supported. That means listeners like you, you can help us thrive by making a gift today. Just go to RevealNews.org/gift. Again, that’s RevealNews.org/gift, and thank you. This episode was produced by Josh Sanburn, Steven Rascon, and Kara McGuirk-Allison. Theme music and engineering help by Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. I’m Al Letson, and let’s do this again next week. This is More to the Story. |