How did Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg get added to a Signal group chat with Trump administration officials discussing their plans for an airstrike in Yemen?
The simplest explanation: National Security Adviser Mike Waltz had Goldberg saved as a contact in his phone and accidentally added him. Indeed, when Waltz first claimed that Goldberg’s phone number was “sucked in” from another contact, Goldberg scoffed, This isn’t ‘The Matrix.
But according to the Guardian, an internal investigation conducted by the White House’s information technology office concluded that something more complicated taken place, with an iPhone auto-suggestion playing a key role: After Goldberg emailed the White House for comment on a story, a Trump spokesperson, Brian Hughes, texted the contents of Goldberg’s email to Waltz.
The disclosures nonetheless triggered a “forensic review” by the White House information technology office, which found that Waltz’s phone had saved Goldberg’s number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October.
According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.
Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.
Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.
A day after that Goldberg story was published, on 22 October, Waltz appeared on CNN to defend Trump. “Don’t take it from me, take it from the 13 Abbey Gate Gold Star families, some of whom stood on a stage in front of a 30,000 person crowd and said how he helped them heal,” Waltz said.
According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.
The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.
Waltz said in the immediate aftermath of the incident that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg. He also suggested on Fox News that Goldberg’s number had been “sucked” into his phone, seemingly in reference to how his iPhone had saved Goldberg’s number.
Previous administrations, including the Biden White House, did not develop an alternative platform to Signal, one of the people said. As a temporary solution, the Trump White House told officials to use Signal as they had done during the transition instead of regular text-message chains.
As a result, Waltz’s iPhone offered a “contact suggestion update” that ultimately saved Goldberg’s phone number under Hughes’ name. Then, when Waltz tried to add Hughes — now a spokesperson for the National Security Council — to the chat, he supposedly ended up adding Goldberg instead.
For his part, Goldberg said, “I’m not going to comment on my relationship with Mike Waltz beyond saying I do know him and have spoken to him.”
