White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said the Trump admin is “reviewing how an inadvertent number was added” to the Signal chat thread.
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was accidentally added to a Trump administration text chat discussing the renewed campaign of U.S. airstrikes on Yemen in the hours after the first bombs dropped, the White House has confirmed.
In a story published in The Atlantic on March 24, journalist and editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg recounted being added to a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal on March 15, nearly three hours before the U.S. government officially announced it had resumed a campaign of strikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Recounting the incident for The Atlantic, Goldberg reported that an individual he believes to have been White House national security adviser Mike Waltz added him to a group chat at 11:44 a.m. ET on March 15. At 2:29 p.m. ET on the same day, Trump took to his Truth Social platform to publicly announce the new U.S. strikes on Yemen.
Goldberg wrote that the Signal user who added him to the group chat, apparently unprompted, was named “Michael Waltz.”
“I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser,” he wrote.
Goldberg recounted other names in the group chat included “JD Vance,” “TG” (whom Goldberg believes was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard), “Scott B” (possibly Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent), “Pete Hegseth,” “John Ratcliffe,” and “MAR” (whom Goldberg noted shares the same initials as Secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio).
Responding to a request for comment from The Epoch Times, White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said the group chat Goldberg was included in looked to be authentic.
“At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes wrote. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.
“The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to our servicemembers or our national security.”
By Ryan Morgan
