The Atlantic has published Signal group chat messages among national security leaders that were inadvertently shared with Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, citing administration officials who said Tuesday they were not classified.
The published chats depict the internal discussions Goldberg described in his Monday article, with figures such as Vice President Vance debating the merits of an airstrike on Houthi targets in Yemen.
The published chat contains information about the attack that the original article did not include, such as the specific timeline of the airstrike and the weapons that would be used.
President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other officials have slammed The Atlantic and Goldberg in an attempt to discredit their reporting. In a statement, The Atlantic stated that it wanted to make the texts public so that people could see them for themselves.
“The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions,” Goldberg and Harris’s coworker wrote.
Hegseth has denied sharing classified information in the group chat in comments to reporters, and during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe stated that the information in the Signal group was not classified.
“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,” The Atlantic’s journalists reported.
It is a move that may have ramifications for the magazine. While officials repeatedly stated Tuesday that the information contained in the chat was not classified, publishing it may still violate the Espionage Act, which prohibits the release of national defense information.
According to the Atlantic, the White House opposed the publication of the information.
“As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the magazine.
“However, as both the CIA Director and the National Security Advisor have stated today, this does not mean we support the release of the conversation. This was intended to be an internal and private deliberation among high-level senior staff, during which sensitive information was discussed. So, for those reasons [sic], we object to the release.”
Leavitt, according to the newspaper, “did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.”
In a Wednesday morning social media post, Leavitt chastised The Atlantic, noting that its headline referred to the Signal messages as a “attack plan” rather than a “war plan,” before directly criticizing Goldberg.
“The Atlantic has conceded that these were not ‘war plans.’ “This entire story was a hoax written by a Trump-hater known for his sensationalist spin,” she wrote on the social media platform X.
On Tuesday, Ratcliffe said “no,” rejecting Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-Ga.) description of the situation as a “huge mistake.”
And he and Gabbard repeatedly stated that no classified information was discussed during the chat, despite the fact that advanced details of a US airstrike are highly sensitive.
“Senator, I will reiterate that there was no classified material shared,” Gabbard told Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (Va.).
