“I’m Not Scared:” Jeffrey Goldberg on Potential Backlash After Signal Leak

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: The White House has declared case closed on the Signal chat scandal, but this story is far from over. Politico is reporting that at least 20 group chats have been set up on the app by the National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s team. Walter Isaacson speaks to the Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who you all know exposed the original bombshell story after Waltz added him to that chat.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And Jeffrey Goldberg, welcome to the show.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG, EDITOR IN CHIEF, THE ATLANTIC: Thank you. Thanks for having.

ISAACSON: I still don’t quite understand how you got into a Signal chat with the defense secretary and the national security adviser about the bombing of the Houthis. The national security adviser, Mike Waltz, says he’s never met you. He called you scum, and he said that his number got sucked into his phone. Is it true that he’s never met you?

GOLDBERG: Well, it’s not true that I’m scum. I mean, opinions differ, right? Check with your doctor. It is not true that we’ve never met. We’ve met. It’s silly. I mean —

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Does he know you’ve met? I mean, is he intentionally saying things that are not true?

GOLDBERG: Believe it or not, he may be intentionally saying things that are not true. Look, you know, according to their reporting by Maggie Haberman and others Donald Trump is not — post-scandal or in the middle of the controversy, Trump was not concerned about the Signal breach, the content of the messages or anything. He was upset because he thought Mike Waltz might be friends with me. Mike Waltz went out and then said things that are not true about me in our relationship. I’m not going to go into it because I don’t comment one way or the other about people — public figures, sources. I don’t comment one way or the other about anything. I just needed to correct the record and say, yes, I know him. Let me frame this diplomatically. Desperation to keep your job can lead some people to say things that are untrue, unwise, and also ad hominem. And that’s all I would say.

ISAACSON: They also said that this wasn’t really that confidential, it wasn’t that secret, that there was no dangerous information in it. Is — do you think that’s true?

GOLDBERG: I mean, it’s — that is the Orwellian part of this here. Here’s the thing — here’s what’s the — here’s one example of what was in the Signal chat. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, saying, we — our F- 18s are launching in a half hour to attack Houthi stronghold targets in Yemen. We all know that the Houthis have anti-aircraft capabilities. If it’s not a secret, if it’s not the most sensitive information in the world, that here is the time our fighter — manned fighter planes, by the way, piloted not drones, human American servicemen, fighter pilots are heading toward Yemen in the very near future, what is secret? Then what counts as secret in the United States government? It’s absurd. I’m not dismissing the Hillary Clinton server in the basement scandal. I’m simply going to point out that Hillary Clinton was never putting out on commercial messaging apps the timing and targeting of American military operations shortly before they launched.

ISAACSON: You’ve written about it eloquently in The Atlantic, you know, what was going through your mind. But walk me through it, when all of a sudden, you’re invited to this group chat, why didn’t you immediately say, no, thanks, I’m a journalist?

GOLDBERG: Well, I said, yes, thanks. I’m a journalist. But mainly — I mean, look, it’s my job to find out what the government is doing, right? Usually, it’s harder than this. I mean, we — you know, you have done that for years as a journalist. You know, everywhere — everybody from Woodward and Bernstein on down, and I’m down that chain, you know, you spend all your days trying to figure out what the government is doing. That’s the role of the press and the free society.

ISAACSON: But did you actually think this was the national security adviser?

GOLDBERG: No, but that’s the point. The point is that — I’ll put it this way, I — talking to colleagues about this. Of course, I thought it was a disinformation operation. I thought it was a campaign. I thought it was a spoof. I don’t know, hoax, whatever, just an act — you know, deception, designed to entrap me, to do something stupid or embarrassing. You know, as people do target journalists these days for that sort of thing. But I did say to a colleague, I said, what are the chances of this is real? And this colleague who knows a lot about this stuff says near zero. Near zero. And that was my conclusion as well, all the way up to the date of the actual attack. And the reason we thought near zero is because this is too stupid to be believed.

ISAACSON: But wait, when did it all of a sudden hit you? Oh, wait, this is real?

GOLDBERG: Saturday the 15th, 11:44 a.m. I see a text come over the transom from Pete Hegseth who says that this is when the attack is going to take place. The first bombs will fall, I think he said at 1350 or 1330. I don’t have it in front of me. This is 11:44, around 11:44 that I’m reading it. And I sort of said, well, all right, then I’ll just sit here and wait. And, you know, realize I can go into social media at around 1330, 1330 by 2:00 p.m. by, you know, 1400 Eastern, and find out if bombs are falling on Sanaa, you know, the capital, the Yemeni capitals, also the Houthis stronghold. If bombs are falling at exactly the time that this person or bot is arguing — is saying that the bombs are going to fall, then I know it’s real or that I know for near certainty that it’s real. If it’s not real, then it’s some crazy operation that I don’t even understand.

ISAACSON: Why did you not publish the whole transcript right away, and then why did you decide to publish it?

GOLDBERG: I didn’t publish the whole transcript right away because I thought that there was information in the transcript that wasn’t necessary, was secret, top secret. Again, I don’t want to traffic an operational information when it’s a live subject. You know, the campaign against Yemen, against the Houthis was continuing, and I’m not going to traffic in technical details. My goal, not to get Americans hurt. OK? That number one goal. And then, so what happened was, and I’ll walk you through this, that Monday morning — you know, I pull myself from the chat. Monday morning, I get in touch with the — Mike Waltz and Steven Miller, Susie Wiles, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, I send them all texts or e-mails. Mike Waltz, I signaled, obviously. And I laid out what was going on and what I was writing and what was — and asked him to confirm, A, that this is even true, that this is a real Signal group called Houthis PC small group, right? The NSC, Mike Waltz’s organization, comes back two hours later and it says, yes, apparently this is a real chain. I was a little surprised that they confirmed quickly, but they had no choice because it is real. Then we published. And then, a Trump —

ISAACSON: But you didn’t publish the whole transcript?

GOLDBERG: No, not the whole thing. Nothing that — you know, nothing that I considered sensitive, colleagues who can judge these things even better than I can thought was particularly sensitive or tactical or operational. We kept, you know, the Hegseth set — the key Hegseth set text I kept out because that was just pure operational detail. Then what happens is Mike Waltz goes on TV and calls me a scumbag and calls me deceitful. And Pete Hegseth says I’m subhuman and that this is a hoax. And Trump says that there’s nothing secret. And I thought, oh, my God. That’s like — that’s terrible because we all — I mean, anybody reading this knows that it’s sensitive, classified, top secret, however you want to call it. I can’t categorize it according to the government classification system because I’m not privy to the government classification system. But it’s obviously deeply sensitive stuff. And so, the next day I said, look, you guys keep saying that it’s not sensitive. So, we’re going to do this exercise now. I’m going to go to each agency, relevant agency and ask them, is there anything truly sensitive in here that I should withhold from publication? If you tell me no, then I’m going to publish it. We do this exercise over the course of that Tuesday and only the CIA asks us to withhold something. It’s funny because the CIA director, Ratcliffe, says there’s nothing secret in — nothing secret or sensitive in the chain. His own people then asks us to withhold information that was in the chain, which we did. But nobody else came in. They weren’t a catch 22. They had built a catch 22. They had driven down a cul-de-sac of their own making in the following sense. By saying that it’s not sensitive, they were freeing me to publish. If they had said that it was sensitive or classified or top secret, they would be opening up themselves to possible charges, you know, at least gross negligence. So, by downplaying the importance of operational security, by saying this was — didn’t matter, they freed us to go out and say, no, this is what it is. You judge for yourself. You American citizens, read this now and judge this for yourself. So, that’s what we did. We put it out. We called their bluff. They goaded us in a kind of weird and dumb way to do this. I didn’t want to, but when they called The Atlantic liars, when they called me a liar, and when they said there’s nothing sensitive in it, I thought our role as the press is to let the American people decide for themselves if it’s sensitive or not. That’s what — that’s our role in society. And so, we put it out and then people made their own judgements.

ISAACSON: What would’ve happened if this had gone to somebody other than you?

GOLDBERG: Yes. I mean, I suppose, look, I’m an American journalist, right, not just a journalist. I’m not in this line of work, and I’ve been doing this particular national security kind of work for a long time. You know, you make a decision early on, you are not going to share information that could put. Americans in harm’s way. After the fact, you can autopsy a report, you know, you could do a postmortem on any operation. You could criticize as much as you want. I’m interested in why they do things, how they do things, the ideological disputes, the role of America in the world. I’m not interested — I don’t need to know, from my perspective, that the plane is taking off at 12:15 and not 12:30. So, there’s that. I mean, if it’d fallen into other hands, I mean, that is sort of a theoretical — it’s a theoretical question, I guess, but it’s a nightmare question. Here’s a scenario. It could have gone to a diplomat whose name was in his phone, and that diplomat might be friends with another diplomat, and that diplomat be friends with an Iranian diplomat, and that it might have been a game of telephone where information has actually passed, that would’ve given time for the Houthis to either rearrange where they were at the time, or even more dangerously, for Americans in the air, they could have actually prepared an anti-aircraft program that would’ve been more effective than it obviously was. From a national security adviser standpoint, it’s a complete and total disaster to put out that kind of information into a commercial app.

ISAACSON: I wanna ask you a personal question. Couple days after you published, you came down to New Orleans and actually walked in and surprised my Tulane class, and you taught them, and you talked about your family’s reaction and what you called your family’s group chat. Tell me how your family reacted to all this.

GOLDBERG: Yeah, the Goldberg PC small group. So at a certain point, this became comical. Mike Waltz started going on Foxing that I somehow sucked his phone num – my phone number into his phone number, or there was a Signal breach or some, something. They were making up all kinds of crazy stories. Elon Musk was then gonna come in and investigate how I manipulated my number into his phone. And so one of my kids in the Goldberg PC small group chat wrote that – I just thought this was really funny ’cause it’s true – said the most amazing part of this story is that daddy has finally figured out how to take a screenshot. Because I am not gifted in this realm. And I will literally ask my kids, so you press both buttons on the side at the same time. The idea that I was manipulating Signal is laughable. And it comes back to this key point, which is, and there are a lot of conspiracy theories of course out there, but I was in his phone and I was added to the group. Who he meant to add, they won’t tell us. It wasn’t me.

ISAACSON: A lot of people have been bullied by this administration, whether it’s university presidents, law firms, and they’ve all seemed to cave. Can you be bullied by this administration? Are you worried about what they might do to you?

GOLDBERG: No, I can’t be bullied, and I’m not worried. If they try to do things to people, they try to do things to people, but that’s the price you pay. And the whole idea of bullying is that there has to be, there’s two parties to a bullying process, right? There’s the bully and the person who lets themself be bullied. Like, you know, like these law firms who are giving in, TV networks that are making, you know the George Stephanopolis thing at ABC or Washington Post and the, and the endorsement. You know, people who are bullied think that if they just give the thing that the bully says he wants, the bullying will stop. It doesn’t stop until you, until you just resist it. So, like, and my, I don’t know. I’m not, I I’m just not, I’m not scared of them. They want to, they want to mess with us or other people. I hope they don’t. That would be silly. But, you know, we have a role to play in society. The free press has a role to play in a transparent democracy, and we’re gonna play it. That’s it. End of story.

ISAACSON: What’s the true lesson from this? Is it just that they were sloppy, inviting people like you into group chats, or is there some deeper lesson here?

GOLDBERG: I mean, I don’t know how deep you can go. It’s — they didn’t take operational security seriously that suggests that they’re not serious people. I think Pete Hegseth there’s an interesting — I think it was almost cosplaying a little bit, like, oh, we’re bombing at midnight, kind of, you know, it’s like, you don’t have to play secretary defense, you are secretary defense. Like, you don’t have to share that kind of information. Maybe because J. D. Vance was on the chat, they were showing off a little bit. I don’t know, you know, showing off for the vice president. I can’t explain it. But the real lesson here is that the keystone cop’s quality of this makes America’s allies, who are already wondering about our allyship, makes America’s allies wonder, you know, these guys are fundamentally not serious. And where does that become a serious, serious issue, when they are hesitant? I’m talking about U.K., in Australia and New Zealand and you know, the Five Eyes group and then NATO and everybody else. When they’re — remember that it turns out, and this is subsequent reporting not my own, that the Israelis had a spy on the ground of some sort who was giving them real-time information that’s been reported. And so, you’re the Israelis and you’re like, we’re giving you this very sensitive informatiofn, and you’re talking about it on a commercial messaging app. So, it undermines national security because it makes us seem less trustworthy.

ISAACSON: You came on the show, we talked in, I think, December of 2023. And let me read back something you said then. Another Trump presidency poses an existential threat to American democracy. We’re now about 10 weeks into this administration. Give me your assessment now. Is that still hold?

GOLDBERG: Yes. I mean, you know, there’s a million things going on. We’re getting wave — you know, we’re — there’s wave after wave after wave. But the larger point is, you know, they’re firing assistant U.S. attorneys who offended their allies. They’re removing FOIA offices where you can like — where you can get government information, you know, where you can sue for government, private government information. They’re dismantling all of — they’re dismantling any operation, any office in the government that could investigate themselves. The first thing you do if you are authoritarian minded, is you make sure that you neutralize all the people who could investigate you. That’s the prerequisite for going off and doing what you want. We’re in that phase right now. Some people in the judiciary are fighting back, but you know, we’re heading toward that crisis moment where they just ignore the judge’s order. But you know, when you put loyalists like Kash Patel in charge of the FBI, what you’re basically telling the world is, we are never going to investigate our own flaws. And that puts you on the road to authoritarianism. And being on the road to authoritarianism means that, you know, the American experiment, as we understand it, could be coming to an end unless accountability is returned to the system.

ISAACSON: Jeffrey Goldberg, thank you so much for joining us.

GOLDBERG: Thank you.