What The Hell America!

Journalism’s biggest scoops usually require months — years! — of shoe-leather reporting. Developing sources. Building trust. Coaxing out documents. Analyzing data. Assembling tiny fragments of information — perhaps insignificant on their own — into a damning portrait of malfeasance, graft, or abandonment of duty.

But sometimes, you just get dropped into the wrong group text.

That’s what happened to The Atlantic’s top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, when — thanks to a truly epic misjudgment by someone in the Trump administration — he started receiving detailed American bombing plans via the encrypted chat app Signal, as part of a group chat that seemed to include everyone from Pete Hegseth to J.D. Vance to Marco Rubio. (Along with national security advisor Michael Waltz, whose mistake it seems to have been to include Goldberg in this digital assemblage of top federal officials.)

Goldberg published a story about the astonishing event shortly after noon on Monday, commanding the combined attention of the political and media world. (Full disclosure: I occasionally write for The Atlantic.) It raised entire constellations of questions.

• Operational: Is it really a good idea for the world’s greatest military power to be planning bombing campaigns on a chat app you can find in the App Store? (But her emails!) And how many other randos in Mike Waltz’s Contacts app were getting bombing intel? His cousin, his dry cleaner, his insurance agent? And how many laws were broken along the way?
• Geopolitical: Do America’s top officials really kinda hate our closest allies? Do bombing campaigns usually inspire prayer emoji?
• Journalistic: How many billable hours did The Atlantic’s lawyers book before hitting publish? How much checking went into confirming Goldberg wasn’t the victim of an extraordinarily complex prank? And why did he decide to leave the group chat as soon as he concluded it was real, anyway?

Hegseth initially denied the story, declaring “Nobody was texting war plans,” which Goldberg (a “so-called journalist“) labeled a lie. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who was in the chat, is sticking by the idea that “there was no classified material that was shared in that Signal chatroom,” which would seem to stretch any number of definitions. (If a list of specific people the United States military is about to try to kill isn’t classified, consider this my FOIA request.) But this morning, Donald Trump — having initially been unaware of the leak — confirmed it, but described it as a mere “glitch” from which Waltz “has learned a lesson.”

Journalists online mostly praised Goldberg’s handling of the story, especially for avoiding what he called “preemptive obeying” of the Trump administration’s wishes. But one question keeps popping up: Why had Goldberg voluntarily removed himself from the chat? Why not stick around, given the likelihood that his presence would remained unnoticed and that more information of public importance would flow through this channel? We asked The Atlantic about that, and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance emailed us this:

As Jeffrey has written, he opted to leave the chat when it became clear to us that it was real, given the extraordinary sensitivity of the discussion taking place. Please remember this was a conversation that included the full name of an active CIA officer; precise information about human targets, weapons, and attack timing (including the exact times of attacks before they took place) as well as damage assessments in real time.

…we speak frequently in our newsroom about the importance of skepticism and caution in a variety of scenarios — whether assessing an unexpected Signal message, vetting a news tip from a known or unknown source, or any other encounter that comes up in the course of reporting or non-reporting life. As journalists working in the public interest, especially in an environment that is hostile to journalists — and hostile to reality — we have very little room for error. So we talk about the need to be extremely careful while also aggressively and fearlessly pursuing truth on behalf of the public.

(Even fuller disclosure: I hired Adrienne to work here at Nieman Lab back in 2012 — one of my smarter decisions, I must say — and she sometimes edits my stories for The Atlantic.)

It’s noteworthy to me that Goldberg describes his decision to exit the chat as coming as soon as he was convinced it was real and not some elaborate scheme. 2025-era Trump — when he’s not busy shutting down news outlets entirely — has been eager to pursue legal action against journalists, whether for boring sponsorship messages, standard video editing, selling subscriptions, or even just publishing polling data he didn’t like. At the moment Goldberg became convinced that he was being cc’d on actual military secrets, he would have become the knowing recipient of any highly classified information that came through his phone — or, at a minimum, it would have been very easy for the Trump administration to argue he was.

Leaking sensitive information to journalists — even classified or secret information — is of course an age-old practice. But this administration seems to have its heart set on prosecuting journalists on the receiving end.

In 2022, at rallies for GOP candidates, Trump called for journalists receiving leaks from government officials to be jailed, suggesting the prospect of being raped in prison would get journalists to talk. (“When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was.’”)

The next year, Trump called for the “reporter, publisher, [and] editor” of Politico to be arrested for publishing a leaked draft version of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. (“Put whoever in jail until” journalists reveal the leaker, he said. Supreme Court draft opinions are not classified material.)

Last year’s Project 2025 — whose agenda Trump has been vigorously pursuing so far — specifically called for eliminating a Justice Department policy that limited how much it could investigate journalists who receive leaked material. As former Washington Post editor Marty Baron put it in a December interview: “They have a lot of tools in their toolbox, and I think they will use every single one of them. That’s already evident from the measures that they are promising to take. I think they are salivating for the opportunity to prosecute journalists for leaks of supposed national security information.”

Today, FBI director Kash Patel — still strange to type those four words together — declined to say whether the bureau would investigate any element of the Signal leak. But if he did decide to open a case, it’s entirely possible Goldberg would be a target of such an investigation, not just a witness. Remember Patel, barely a year ago: “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. ^{We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”}

Prosecution threats are, of course, only a sliver of all the attacks Trump has made against a free press. But if The Atlantic has good media lawyers — and I’m sure they do — I would suspect that limiting Goldberg’s exposure to politically motivated prosecution was a topic that came up more than once.