Atlantic Editor Slams Pete Hegseth’s Defense Of War Plan Group Text Scandal | EUROtoday

The creator of the bombshell Atlantic article who shared a firsthand account of being by chance added to a bunch chat with senior Trump administration officers discussing delicate nationwide safety issues on Monday blasted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s declare that “nobody was texting war plans.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, in his piece defined that nationwide safety adviser Michael Waltz inadvertently invited him to hitch a bunch chat on encrypted messaging app Signal earlier this month with 17 members of Trump’s workforce, together with Hegseth.

While a spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed the textual content thread reported by Goldberg was actual, Hegseth took subject with the journalist’s characterization of the messages.

“Nobody was texting war plans,” Hegseth mentioned, trying straight into the digital camera after touchdown in Hawaii for an official journey. “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Goldberg disputed Hegseth’s evaluation.

“That’s a lie,” he informed CNN’s “The Source.” “He was texting war plans. He was texting attack plans.”

While Goldberg shared a number of the contents of the group chat within the article, he withheld data shared by Hegseth on March 15 two hours forward of a deliberate assault on the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Goldberg wrote that Hegseth’s messages included data “about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” which may have put U.S. navy and intelligence personnel in hurt’s method had it landed within the palms of U.S. adversaries.

In his remarks to reporters, Hegseth launched a private assault on Goldberg, calling him a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”

In response, Goldberg, who expressed his disbelief on the entire episode, accused Hegseth of making an attempt to distract from his reckless conduct.

“The whole thing is just very flummoxing to me, because I haven’t seen this kind of unserious behavior before,” Goldberg informed MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “The secretary of defense, all due respect, in that presentation seems like a person who’s unserious and is trying to deflect from the fact that he participated in a conversation on an unclassified commercial messaging app that he probably shouldn’t have participated in.”