That time the White House texted a journalist its war plans

Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS.

Oh, now it makes sense.

Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Thursday, the twenty seventh of March. I'm Zara Seidler.

I'm Sam Kozlowski.

Earlier this week, the White House confirmed that a journalist was accidentally added to a group chat where a number of the most senior defense officials were discussing a planned strike against the Houthi rebel group in Yemen. The Atlantics editor in chief revealed in an exclusive article that he was accidentally added to the signal group earlier this month, which included Vice President JD Vance and Trump's National Security advisor.

I am so pumped to get into this story.

This is a medi one.

This is one that the Netflix producers are queuing up to try and figure out.

Certainly some commissioning of new pieces.

It's going to be amazing. But I do want to start by fully understanding how all of this happened, because the idea of not only somebody being added to a grip chat where they're discussing what we're going to tell you about, but it being the editor of a huge news outlet in America is wild. So This story begins on Tuesday, March eleven. Yeah, why is that day important?

So that's the day that Jeffrey Goldberg says that he was first sent a connection request on Signal from someone called Michael Woltz.

So there's a few characters there.

I was going to say, that might sound like gibberish to a lot of our listeners, So let's just unpack it one by one. So let's start with Jeffrey Goldberg. So Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of the Atlantic, which, as you just mentioned, is an American media company known mostly for magazines. He is the person who received a request on Signal, which is a messaging app that has a kind of higher level of security than, for example, texting.

And on that day he got a fairly random request.

So it's a Tuesday, a couple of weeks ago, and the editor of The Atlantic gets a notification saying that there was a request coming through that he'd be added to a group. Ye who actually sent that request?

So that request came from a user called Michael Waltz. Now, just for context, Michael Waltz is President Donald Trump's national security advisor, and so naturally, when Goldberg, who is a journalist, received the request.

He thought it was fake, as we would, to be honest with you.

Yeah, I mean, he said, and I'll quote directly from the article. I would implore anyone listening to go read that article. It is incredibly well written and a very good read. But he says, and I quote here, Trump's contentious relationship with journalists and Trump's periodic fixation on me specifically was what built this doubt that the request was real.

That's really interesting. So his initial gut feel after he entertained whether it was false, was maybe this guy's a source. Maybe this guy could be leaking something to me. So he accepts the message, but then it definitely does not go in the way that he expected.

No, So after that, Goldberg receives a notification that he's been added to a signal group Chat.

That group chat is called the Huthy PC Small Group.

And we have talked about the Huthis number of times on this pod, but for people coming in fresh, give me a sense of who the Houthis are.

So, the Huthis are an Iran backed group based out of Yemen. They've been fighting in a civil war in Yemen since twenty fourteen. Hoothy forces control parts of the country, and Yemen specifically borders the Red Sea, which is a popular trade route for international commercial vessels, accounting for roughly

And so the US have had the Houthis in their line of sight for a while now, particularly since October twenty twenty three. And so that group chat name the houthy PC Small Group. Yeah, how is that actually connected to the Hoothies.

So apparently the houthy PC Small Group was, as we later found out a chat designed to pull together a group of the most senior decision makers in the US to coordinate an impending US attack on the Houthis in Yemen.

Which we reported on. So this is like this really interesting thing reading this story knowing that we actually covered that.

We covered the attack. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so in this article, Goldberg says that the group was created by Waltz, the Advisor, and he says that the group chat members as they were were VP jd Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Intelligence head Telsey Gabbard, and a whole string.

I mean, I could list off.

All of them, but I just want you to understand they were really really senior people here.

And so basically this group was assembled on signal to plan how the US was going to attack the who he's in Yemen. Yeah, I mean it's the main point of communication almost. Yeah.

So it wasn't even just how they were going to attack, but whether or not they should attack. All of that kind of as we understand it now played out in this group message. So the article that Goldberg wrote included some of the bits of the chat that he believed were important to report on. He did leave out sensitive kind of national security things like CIA officials names and

And so Goldberg gets all of these messages. He's still in the group. Yeah, it's evident from the chat that nobody's actually noticed that he's in the group. Yeah, but things really, I did.

Ask you if you would notice if there was some one in a group chat and you told.

Me that you would, I think I would. I feel like I would know, especially if there was some serious sort of confidential information being passed around. You'd hope that. I mean, this wasn't a group of hundreds and hundreds, No, it was a select group. Nonetheless, they didn't know Goldberg was there by this point. But the contents of the message is really escalated, right, Yeah.

So Goldberg writes in his article that after he read that message about those operational plans, things that included like timings and what was going.

To happen, he really started to believe that the group was real for the first time.

Wow. So he was still thinking that this could have been fake.

I mean, I think every journalist has a healthy kind of skepticism built into them, and that was very active here. He wrote that the last message implied that the attacks on the Huthies would start two hours after that last message, and so he sat, he said, in a car park, and he waited, and then at one fifty five pm local time, ten minutes after the attack was planned according to that last message, Goldberg said, he logged onto x and he saw that lo and behold, explosions were being

To bring things from the group chat into the real world, we know that these attacks on who he targets in Yemen have continued this week. Yeah, and that kind of brings us to today. And while we're talking about not only the release of this group chat and Goldberg's piece, but also the actual US activity in Yemen, Jeffrey Goldberg published this amazing article on Monday. What's the response been since then? Yes.

So at the end of Goldberg's article, he basically explains the steps that he took then to verifying the story itself. So he says that he left the chat, and then shortly after leaving the chat, he says he can't believe no one even noticed that he then left the chat let alone.

Was in it to begin with.

It's funny for me because you get then he was saying that there's a line that emerges in the group chat saying, yeah, his phone number has left the chat. Yeah.

But he says that after he left, he contacted some of the officials in the group directly and he asked them to confirm whether or.

Not the group was real.

He says that a spokesperson for the National Security Council responded to him directly and ultimately confirmed the veracity of the group. The spokesperson said, and I quote here, this appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain. Then on Monday, after this expose was published, we did have the White House come out and publicly confirm again that the group was authentic.

And so that all happened on Monday. We're now sitting here on Thursday morning. How has the president but also his administration more broadly responded to what is one of the most significant pieces of journalism I think in yeah, the last couple of years at least.

Yes, So, so the administration has downplayed the incident. They called the chat a sign of deep and thoughtful policy coordination. So rather than I guess, focusing on the fact that there was a journalist who was accidentally added to it, they're more focusing on the to and fro that were in these messages about how they were discussing approaching the issue of the who thy's.

But then inside of that, it does seem like Mike Waltz, who again.

Was the person who added Jeffrey Golberg to the group, that he has taken most of the blame here. He has taken full responsibility at the time of recording. He has not stepped down, however, and we understand that he still has the support of the president. In terms of the president himself, Trump has denied knowledge of the chat, and again there was nothing in that chat that implied that he would have known about it.

But we do know it.

As I said a bit earlier, that Jade Vance was in that conversation perhaps taking a different position to the President when it came to how to respond to the who thies. Since that time, Events spokesperson has insisted that he fully supports the President's policies. Of course, if we go to the other side of the aisle, the Democrats have been very vocal in their condemnation of what happened here.

And it's not just those in Congress and the House that are condemning this. I mean, you've got Hillary Clinton, who was famously brought into a serious leak of her own emails that had confidential information. Arguably some would say that ended her prospects of becoming president because of the way it was used so effectively by President Trump in the debates. She tweeted, You've got to be kidding me,