The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg is not worried about any potential retaliation by the Trump Administration after he published messages that were sent to him as part of a Signal group chat about “imminent war plans” in Yemen.
“I don’t get bullied. I’m not worried about that. They’re obviously being very, very silly there,” Goldberg told Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “There’s a playbook that — and you know this as a journalist, I’m not the only journalist to be the target of these kind of attacks — when they do something wrong, they go on the attack and they attack the messenger.”
The strange part of the story, the editor noted, is that “I didn’t really actually do anything. I’d like to claim that I was some bold investigative reporter here. All I did was answer a message request from Mike Waltz on Signal, and then the rest of it just came on my phone.”
“So even if I had those terrible character traits that they ascribe to me, all I did was simply print what they said. So I don’t think the tactic is working. Sometimes it works, sometimes people get intimidated. We at The Atlantic are not intimidated by this nonsense. We’re going to keep reporting the truth as we see it. And I just think it’s kind of silly deflection,” Goldberg explained.
At the beginning of the exchange, he disputed Mike Waltz’s assertion that Goldberg’s number was somehow “sucked” into his phone. “Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones,” Goldberg said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about there. You know, very frequently in journalism, the most obvious explanation is the explanation. My phone number was in his phone because my phone number is in his phone.”
“He’s telling everyone that he’s never met me or spoken to me. That’s simply not true,” he added. “I understand why he’s doing it, but you know, this has become a somewhat farcical situation. There’s no subterfuge here. My number was in his phone. He mistakenly added me to the group chat. There we go.”
The messages were inadvertently sent to Goldberg in the days before the U.S. launched an air and naval attack in Yemen. The strikes were made “in an effort to open international shipping lanes in the Red Sea that the Houthis have disrupted for months with their own attacks,” The New York Times reported on March 15, the day the strikes took place.
A total of 18 people were on the group chat, including Waltz and JD Vance, who noted at the time that he believed the strikes were a “mistake.”
“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices,” the vice president wrote.
Both Welker and Goldberg noted that it appeared Vance was openly disagreeing with Trump’s stance on the attacks. “I read it as very fraught, because what JD Vance is saying in the group chat, which included, as you know, much of the Cabinet, much of the president’s Cabinet, he’s saying the president doesn’t even understand what he’s doing here,” Goldberg explained.
“So I found that remarkable, obviously, given that JD Vance has tried very hard to make sure that he’s 100% aligned with what Trump says,” he concluded. You can watch the interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the video above.
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