Journalist who leaked White House texts punches back after ‘scum’ vitriol

After copping a beating from the Trump camp following the administration’s astonishing amateur hour, one US journalist has doubled down.

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The fallout from senior Trump administration officials’ use of Signal to discuss their secret plans for military strikes continues to grow.

We know about their utilisation of the platform, which is not supposed to be used for discussions of sensitive government information, because one of the participants accidentally added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a chain in which officials were discussing imminent strikes on the Houthis in Yemen.

Members of the group chat included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

It was Mr Hegseth, a Fox News host before Mr Trump nominated him to run the US military, who shared specific details about the strikes shortly before they happened.

The whole time Mr Goldberg, who as editor of The Atlantic is a mere private citizen, was in the thread. He has said he thought his addition to the Signal chat was some sort of hoax until the strikes its participants had discussed actually took place.

In his initial reporting on the security breach, Mr Goldberg refrained from publishing specific details, and instead merely summarised them.

Today the magazine decided to publish the Signal thread in full, with one redaction of a CIA operative’s name, to counter the Trump administration’s various attempts to downplay it.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had labelled the report a “hoax” and its author a “Trump hater”. Meanwhile multiple officials, including Mr Hegseth himself, had denied that any classified information was discussed in the chat.

The full thread, now made public, shows Mr Hegseth had in fact posted the specific timings of the strikes, and had detailed which military equipment would be used.

This is the sort of information that could have compromised the mission, and put American servicemembers’ lives at risk, if it had fallen into the lap of the wrong person.

And at issue here is not only the blunder of adding Mr Goldberg to the Signal chat, but the use of Signal for this purpose at all, given it’s far less secure than the usual US government channels and could conceivably be accessed by the country’s adversaries.

Read on for the latest updates.

Originally published as Journalist who leaked White House texts punches back after ‘scum’ vitriol