US Defence Secretary Pete Hagseth has reacted to screenshots from a chatroom on Signal published by The Atlantic.
According to him, The Atlantic published so-called “military plans” from the chat room, but they do not contain names, targets, routes, sources or any classified information.
“This proves only one thing: Jeff Goldberg has never seen a war plan or ‘plan of attack’ (as he now calls it). Not even close. We will continue to do our job and the media will do what they do best: spread hoaxes,” he wrote on social media X.
The Atlantic magazine on Wednesday published the allegedly full text of correspondence between senior US officials, including the Pentagon chief and the US vice president, in the messenger chat room Signal, which mistakenly included the publication’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
The correspondence includes, among other things, such data as the timing of US strikes against Yemeni Houthis and the types of aircraft used for those strikes, as well as preliminary information about the results of the strikes.
The Atlantic notes that the publication decided to make the correspondence public because the administration of President Donald Trump has repeatedly denied the presence of any classified information in it.
Earlier, Pete Hagseth said that no one in the administration of US President Donald Trump” did not send text messages about military plans ” in the messenger Signal.
Hagseth called Goldberg, who revealed the secret chat on messenger Signal, “a lying and extremely discredited so-called journalist”.
On 24 March, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of US magazine The Atlantic, described how President Donald Trump’s national security team included him in a secret chat room discussing strikes against Yemen’s Houthis. He said the discussion took place on the messenger Signal, which allows the exchange of encrypted messages. The chat included Trump’s national security adviser Mike Walz (he was the one who sent Goldberg the invitation), Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defence Pete Hagset and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The chat was called the Houthi PC small group (“small group versus Houthi”). In it, Goldberg writes, a user named Pete Hagseth posted data “about upcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would deploy, and the sequence of attacks.”
The journalist appeared in the chatroom under the initials JG. He suggests that he was added by mistake instead of some other senior White House official with the same initials.