Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris write:

So, about that Signal chat.

On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

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. 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. [Continue reading…]

Politico reports:

Over the past two months, President Donald Trump and the people in his orbit have used bullying, misdirection and brute force to bring some of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions to heel.

That playbook didn’t work on The Atlantic.

The magazine, loathed by Trump and his allies, on Wednesday morning published the entire group chat conversation among top administration officials about a military operation in Yemen. In doing so — after press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the magazine “we object to the release” — Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg and national security reporter Shane Harris effectively stood up to an administration that has largely grown used to getting its way — and dared a White House with limited options to make the next move.

“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 reporters wrote.

It was a remarkable rebuke of Trump, who since Inauguration Day has embarked on a revenge tour, tearing through the federal government, elite universities, news organizations and law firms he sees as enemies. And it left the president, unable to flex his typical levers of power, with limited options — with the most straightforward way out being something he is loath to do: apologize.

“There’s only one response to a mistake of this magnitude: You apologize, you own it and you stop everything until you can figure out what went wrong and how it might not ever happen again,” Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday during a hearing. “That’s not what happened. The secretary of Defense responded with a brutal attack on the reporter who did not ask to be on the Signal chain.”

Allies, too, were urging the administration to turn down the temperature.

“I think the important thing is here they made a mistake, they know it,” said Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday. “They should own it and fix it so it never happens again.”

Aided by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Trump has moved to gut a federal government he and his allies see as being run by an antagonistic “deep state.” One of the country’s biggest news networks, ABC News, settled with Trump for $15 million, and another, CBS News, appears poised to settle for millions more. The law firm Paul, Weiss, once a champion against the president in his first term, pledged $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues Trump has supported. And Columbia University, an Ivy League institution older than the Republic itself, agreed to nine unprecedented policy changes in an effort to open talks that would unfreeze $400 million in federal funding.

But The Atlantic’s case was different.

When national security adviser Mike Waltz inadvertently added Goldberg to a Signal group chat of other top administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, as they discussed attack plans against Houthi rebels this month, it was a major, self-inflicted screw-up.

Against other foes, Trump has largely taken a strongman approach, signing executive actions against them and pulling federal funding. But those options don’t exist in this case, which has forced Trump into his base-level strategy: “Attack, attack, attack.” [Continue reading…]