On Monday, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that a member of the Trump administration unexpectedly added him to a group text chain in which top national security officials were discussing immediate plans to carry out airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthis (Ansar Allah). The strikes are reported to have killed 53 people last Saturday, including 31 civilians. The text message chain included Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, as well as nearly a dozen other high-level officials. The person who added Goldberg was national security adviser Mike Waltz. Without any explanation, Goldberg had essentially been given access to the situation room. He wrote:

“I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.”

This was a level of first-hand access to the inner workings of government that most journalists only ever dream of. Over the course of two days, Goldberg watched as members of the Trump cabinet deliberated, they believed, without fear of public scrutiny before taking a major military action. They spoke at will about classified information¹—which Goldberg made a point not to include in his article—and engaged in unfiltered debate about how and whether to proceed with such a significant strike.

Probably the most significant thing unearthed, aside from the administration’s flagrant and likely illegal recklessness with classified information, is that there was sincere disagreement between members of the Trump team about whether to launch this strike. Most notably, J.D. Vance stated plainly his belief that they were “making a mistake” by striking Yemen, notably not because of any civilian toll (it should be noted that five children are reported dead) but because opening shipping lanes in the Red Sea would benefit Europe more than America and could cause oil prices to spike. He was politely rebuffed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said he shared Vance’s “loathing of European free-loading,” but that they needed to follow President Trump’s clear directive “to reopen shipping lanes.” (The shipping lanes, it should also be noted, are now being obstructed by the Houthis in response to Israel’s renewed onslaught of Gaza, which restarted last week with unseen ferocity following a nearly two-month “ceasefire,” a renewed outbreak of violence which the U.S. is 100 percent supportive of.)

As Goldberg watched these deliberations unfold, he was understandably incredulous about the fact that he was included. That is, until he checked Twitter/X to confirm that explosions were indeed being reported in Yemen. He then turned back to the chat to watch as the top-level security officials celebrated the bombing with a bevy of emojis: American flags, fists pumping, hands praying. It was at this point Goldberg knew that the chat was real and that he truly was observing the innermost workings of a presidential administration completely undetected. And so, he did what any inquisitive journalist would do given those circumstances. He removed himself from the group.

I’m sorry… he did WHAT? Yeah, that’s right. He just removed himself from the group, a move he explains that he made “understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, ‘Michael Waltz,’ that I had left.” When I read this, my jaw was on the floor for a good few minutes. I haven’t been in the journalism game as long as Jeffrey Goldberg. When he left his job as a humble IDF prison guard to join the Washington Post, kicking off his illustrious career as a man of letters, I had not yet been born, so maybe he knows more than me. But if I were put in the position Goldberg found himself in, I simply cannot fathom doing what he did.

Goldberg was given a one in a million opportunity to observe the heights of American power unchecked, unfiltered, with top Trump administration officials acting as if they believed nobody was watching them. This is never a situation journalists are in, and Goldberg was well aware of that. By what appears to have been sheer, dumb luck, he was given the opportunity to be a fly on the wall in the most secretive room in the world. Instead of waiting and watching, taking in every bit of information he could, he decided to buzz on over to the middle of the table where everyone could see him and say, Hey guys, so I’m a fly and I accidentally ended up on your wall, I think there’s been some kind of mix-up and I saw some stuff I wasn’t supposed to see. Sorry! I’ll see myself out.

The Atlantic is the worst magazine in America, in no small part thanks to its editor-in-chief, Goldberg. And this entire saga is a perfect example of why. It shows exactly how Goldberg and his ilk view the role of journalists in relation to the powerful. Journalists are often described as “watchdogs” with an “adversarial” relationship to the officials they cover. They are meant to serve the public by providing them with information that those officials would prefer to stay hidden. That’s how the profession’s greatest practitioners, like Woodward and Bernstein, Seymour Hersh, and the late Claud Cockburn thought of their role. But Goldberg does not seem to view his job that way. If he did, he would have hung around to find out as much as possible about these incredibly consequential decisions and reveal it to the public. But his primary loyalties seem to lie less with informing his readers and more with the institution of the U.S. military itself, ensuring that it functions properly. 

Goldberg makes his closeness and deference to the military clear throughout the piece. He went to great lengths to avoid publishing any information that, “if [it] had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.” This is already severely limiting: Just about any piece of reporting on what the U.S. military intends to do could “conceivably” lead to harm against U.S. personnel because it could tip off adversaries to our next moves. (This might be why so much of the article was dedicated to frivolities like what emojis the Cabinet used.) But in this case especially, it doesn’t make any sense because Goldberg waited to publish any information about the strikes until a full nine days after the strikes had been carried out, so any information about pre-planning would not have been of any use to the Houthis.

Goldberg also made a point of redacting anything he believed was classified, even though he almost certainly could have gotten away with publishing it because it was given to him directly, not obtained through any illicit means. (Even if it had been obtained illegally, Supreme Court precedent from the Pentagon Papers case suggests he probably could have published most of it unless it may have caused an inevitable, direct, and immediate threat to U.S. personnel.) But even if Goldberg was putting himself at personal risk, that’s something journalists do every day—in fact, 124 journalists were killed while doing their jobs last year, making it the deadliest year on record. (Incidentally, two thirds of them were in Gaza.) None of them were as famous or as well compensated as Jeffrey Goldberg. 

As Ken Klippenstein wrote in a piece criticizing Goldberg, “Asking if a story is in the ‘national security’ interest rather than the public interest turns the media into self-appointed counterintelligence officers.” As he points out, there are lots of stories the U.S. media has taken on—for instance, reporting about the infirmed state of President Joe Biden—that had huge national security implications. America’s enemies are certainly advantaged by knowing that the American president is mentally declining. But because that’s in the public interest, it (eventually) gets published. It’s also in the public interest for us to know, for instance, if the U.S. is planning more airstrikes on Yemen or planning to attack Iran directly, and yet Goldberg denies us this information. Klippenstein is right when he says Goldberg “sounds more like a Pentagon spokesman than a journalist dedicated to informing the public.” Usually, it’s the government invoking “national security” to avoid their dealings being scrutinized by journalists.

 I suspect there is more to Goldberg’s behavior than simply an attempt to follow the law and avoid personal jeopardy. While Goldberg notes the antipathy held by the Trump administration towards him, he does seem to have been generally on board with the military action itself. Early on, he called the Biden administration’s approach to the Houthis “ineffective,” implying he supported Trump’s “tougher” approach. Goldberg’s magazine, which he presumably has the final say over as editor-in-chief, has also published articles like “Were the Saudis Right About the Houthis After All?” (Spoiler: The writer thinks, essentially, yes.)

And though he notes his rocky relationship with the Trump administration, Goldberg demonstrates a general comfort and coziness hobnobbing with national security policymakers. Early on, he notes that he “didn’t find it particularly strange that” the national security adviser “might be reaching out” to him, saying he “was hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.” Apparently, Goldberg is close enough with America’s national security establishment that he wouldn’t find it unusual for one of its members to just call him up for a casual chat. As for why Waltz would have had Goldberg’s contact in Signal at all, Ryan Grim of Drop Site News reports that, according to an unnamed source, Goldberg was “an ally in some internal Trump admin fights” and that Waltz “was already leaking” to him. If that’s the case, then Goldberg’s portrayal of himself as a flummoxed member of the independent press is flat-out dishonest.

You can see through Goldberg’s telling of this ordeal that he isn’t really all that concerned with the content of what Trump’s cabinet were discussing, or the importance of Americans having this glimpse into how important decisions get made. His more immediate concern seemed to be that these officials were violating military procedure and risking national security—something he expounds upon at great length. These are not unimportant concerns, obviously. For the Trump administration to be so flagrantly disregarding basic security protocols that they don’t even know who is in their secret text conversation, while claiming to be “clean on OPSEC” as Hegseth put it in one text, is supremely embarrassing. (Not to mention hypocritical, since many in Trump’s orbit have called for Hillary Clinton to be thrown in jail for mishandling national security info in a far less compromising manner.) But is not following proper security protocol really the most outrageous thing on display here?

There are a lot of fascinating, damning little nuggets of information in these texts that warrant commentary, like the fact that nobody, at any point, raised a single concern about the loss of civilian life or the risk of increasing the already heightened hostilities with Iran. Among Vance and Hegseth, there seemed to be more debate about “messaging” to the public, and about the goal of “minimiz[ing] risk to Saudi oil facilities,” than there was about the actual potential human costs of a strike, which—again—were significant. Goldberg at least pointed out that 53 people were reported dead. But he added the caveat that this figure came from the “Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry” and “has not been independently verified” (You’ll surely remember the use of the term “Hamas-run” for the Gaza Health Ministry to cast doubt upon the obscene death tolls coming from Israel’s military campaign there.) At no point did Goldberg mention that the majority of those reported casualties ended up being civilians. And like Goldberg, most other media outlets covering this have focused on the leak as the big scandal rather than any of the content that was leaked.

I think that’s owed in part to Goldberg’s decision to act as a gatekeeper for what the public was allowed to know and his decision to recuse himself from digging further. I find it very irresponsible of Goldberg as a journalist to turn away an opportunity to continue informing the public for as long as possible about what the Trump administration’s internal deliberations were like in the days following the strike. 

On Wednesday, Goldberg released all the messages unredacted (with the exception of naming John Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, who is a current CIA intelligence officer, who Goldberg says “are traditionally not publicly identified.”) The unredacted text messages did not reveal very much new information—though Goldberg did release one exchange omitted from the original article that I found disturbing: Mike Waltz and J.D. Vance learning that the Houthis’ “top missile guy” had been killed. Waltz explains that “We had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building, and it’s now collapsed.” Vance replies, “Excellent.” Here are administration officials reacting with cold indifference to the fact that at least one civilian noncombatant was presumably dead, and—if the entire building collapsed—likely many others. Considering they said “building” rather than “house,” that leads me, and presumably the people reading the messages, to assume it was an apartment building with many groups of people living in it. Apparently, the Vice President found it “excellent” that such a dwelling had collapsed, though Goldberg did not find this exchange worth sharing initially.

It’s worth emphasizing that Goldberg only chose to release the messages after the Trump administration spent two days calling him a liar and claiming that there was “no classified information” in the text message chain in which he’d been included. In an article releasing the new messages, Goldberg wrote that “There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.” It was the right thing for Goldberg to release the unredacted messages. But if he acknowledges that there is a “clear public interest” for us to have known what was in them, why weren’t they released in the first place? (And why, even now, are they still behind a paywall?)

 Even if we now have the unredacted messages Goldberg was present for, we still missed out on tons of valuable information because the wrong man happened to be in the right place at the right time. If he was going to write an article anyway, which he did, why not stay for as long as possible and gather as much dirt as possible? There are questions we could, and should, have received answers to: How did the Trump administration respond after learning of the civilian toll? How seriously are they considering a direct strike on Iran? Are they continuing to make decisions on where and how to strike based on what they think the oil market might do? Exactly how much of a spineless worm is J.D. Vance? These are questions that the American public deserves to have answered for them, and a good journalist would have tried their best to do it. Sadly, instead of a good journalist, we got Jeffrey Goldberg.

1. The Trump administration has insisted that none of this information was actually classified, claiming that Pete Hegseth had “classification authority” over all of it and that he did not classify it. Even if we accept that he has this authority, it’s entirely unclear why Hegseth would deem it wise to declassify the operational details about an imminent military action. It’s pretty clear that Hegseth is only saying this now because the information got leaked. As the New York Times notes, “Going back to at least the Reagan administration…the government has considered information about ‘military plans, weapons or operations’ to be classified.” Hegseth has also insisted that “Nobody’s texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say,” which the texts released by Goldberg emphatically demonstrate is not true.

The administration is using a very similar defense here to what Trump himself used when he brought a bunch of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago—that he was able to “declassify” them just by “thinking about it.” But if that’s the case, then it would essentially be impossible for top national security officials to “mishandle” classified information, because they can just declare it “declassified” after the fact.