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Welcome to logoff: Today, Joshua Keating and I focus on top administration officials who are mistakenly sending messages to journalists to plans to bomb Yemen. It's a strange story, a story that has long meaning in the ability of European allies to trust us with sensitive information.
Wait, what? The Atlantic today revealed that Trump's top official accidentally added magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat earlier this month with encrypted messaging app signals. During Goldberg Reading, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and policy adviser Stephen Miller discussed potential attacks on Yemen's military targets.
Then, a few days later, Hegseth sent a message to the group with very sensitive and detailed information about the planned US strike that took place several hours after Hegseth's message.
It is composed. How do you know that chats are not fake? A spokesman for the administration confirmed its credibility.
How big of a mistake is this? This is a major protocol violation for discussing sensitive military operations in group chat. Such conversations take place in safe facilities where mobile phones are normally prohibited.
Is it illegal? The Atlantic reports that national security adviser Michael Waltz, the official who invited Goldberg, may have violated several parts of the spying law. But it's hard to imagine the Trump administration being prosecuted.
So, what is the big picture? Perhaps officials are lucky and Goldberg has been added. Goldberg withheld certain details of the message in the name of national security. But already, US allies are concerned about Trump's familiarity with Russia and hostility towards NATO, but there may be more reasons to feel more wary about the information they share with the administration.
And so, it's time to log off…
Today's news is about the value of group chat (non-state security damage). I'm really grateful to be able to stay in touch with some of my favorite people, even on the long roads, every day, via some text threads. Many of me really picked up during Covid, so I would like to thank my colleague Alex Abad-Santos for this classic (height height) piece. Thank you for reading and I'll see you here tomorrow.
