Summoned to move the neocon message on Trump’s illegal war on Yemen, the Atlantic Magazine editor in chief wound up with more access than he could handle.
U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, center, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, left, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth meeting on Jan. 25. (The White House / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)
By Max Blumenthal
The Grayzone
Atlantic Magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg has won the admiration of his Beltway peers for the conduct he displayed after being accidentally invited into a smoke-filled “bomb Yemen” chat on the Signal messaging service with Trump’s national security honchos and top advisors.
“Props to Jeffrey Goldberg for his high standards as a professional journalist,” declared Ian Bremmer, the trans-Atlanticist foreign policy pundit on his Bank of America-sponsored GZero podcast. “When he realized the conversation was authentic he immediately left, informed the relevant senior official, and made the public aware without disclosing intelligence that could damage the United States.”
jeffrey goldberg left the group chat & informed waltz as soon as he determined authentic war plans were being shared
we should recognize his integrity & tune out efforts to smear him@gzeromediapic.twitter.com/wFOdYf07F7
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) March 25, 2025
But what exactly did Goldberg do to deserve such high praise?
With a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view and report on high level discussions on the U.S. launching an illegal war on Yemen, Goldberg chose to avert his gaze and leave the scene as soon as he could, apparently because maintaining such unparalleled access would have compelled him to report on discussions that might have complicated a war being waged on behalf of the Israeli apartheid state to which he emigrated as a young man.
Goldberg in September 2015. (Center for Strategic & International Studies/Flickr/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Instead of exploiting his front row seat to the Trump admin’s war planning – a vantage point that would have yielded countless scoops and a bestselling book for any adversarial journalist – Goldberg bolted and dutifully informed the White House about the unfortunate situation.
From there, the story became a palace intrigue over an embarrassing failure of “opsec,” or operational security, and not one about the policy itself, which entails a gargantuan empire bombarding a poor, besieged country because it is controlled by a popular movement that is currently the only force on the planet taking up arms to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
In the fourth paragraph of Goldberg’s Atlantic article about the principals’ Signal group, he strongly implied that he supports the war’s objectives, describing Ansar Allah, or the Houthis, as an “Iran-backed terrorist organization” which upholds a belief system that is (what else?) antisemitic.
Given Goldberg’s admission that Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, first reached out to him at least two days prior to mistakenly adding him to the Signal group, it appears the NSC director had been leaking to the Atlantic editor on behalf of the neocon faction in the Trump White House. And it seems clear why Waltz would have sought to cultivate Goldberg.
During the run-up to the Iraq war, then-Vice President Dick Cheney cited Goldberg’s bunk reporting alleging deep ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda during multiple media appearances hyping up the coming invasion.
Under Obama, Goldberg served as Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu’s errand boy, churning out tall tales about Tel Aviv’s imminent plan to attack Iran’s nuclear sites — unless the U.S., did it first.
Goldberg interviewing Obama in the Oval Office in 2014. (Pete Souza//Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the once-failing Atlantic has suddenly turned a profit, as Goldberg unleashed a firehose of propaganda against the keffiyeh-clad enemies of the magazine’s Upper East Side donor base. This month, with momentum for a strike on Iran building within the Trump White House, Goldberg was summoned once again to move the neocon message, and wound up with more access than he bargained for.
When asked in an interview Tuesday with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins why he left the Trump principals’ Signal group voluntarily, Goldberg ducked the question.
But as Bremmer suggested, he did so out of deference to power and an abiding belief in a U.S. empire hellbent on protecting Israel. And in the culture of Beltway access journalism, that’s considered a laudable trait.
The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
This article is from The Grayzone.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
“Given Goldberg’s admission that Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, first reached out to him at least two days prior to mistakenly adding him to the Signal group, it appears the NSC director had been leaking to the Atlantic editor on behalf of the neocon faction in the Trump White House.”
Thanks Max! This puts into perspective why Goldberg was connected to the Signal Chat.
If that is a fact, then it explains the abject hypocrisy by many Congressional Members who are “up in arms” directing their ire against Hegseth. Meanwhile, all those political actors have failed to bring to the fore, Goldberg’s name, nor his previous relationship with Israel.
Well, we’re back to hating Congress. Per usual.
Strong men require, imply, weaker followers ; you just saw some of them in action. And following is a choice that relinquishes their agency ; a lazy choice IMO.
Thanks, Max, for pointing out the real scandal in this story. Not many are doing that.
In his first article we see that Goldberg stays connected to the War Chat for about 33 hours, documenting every word of the communications between 8.30am Friday and 5.16pm Saturday. By the time he left it was all over, with only a final update to come the next day. He says he became concerned about Waltz being notified that he had left the group, but no one contacted him. Then he contacts members of the group to let them know he was there and ask a number of difficult questions.
Genocidal freaks like this only rise to power in a thoroughly corrupted system. Good is evil. Wrong is right. War is peace and all that. Is collapse the only way out of this demoralizing situation?
Right on Lois Gagnon. I sure would love ideas how the Israel lobby can be zapped of its power in the USA.
And also, I sure would like information about how professional organizations of attorneys are responding
to the illegality of the Administration’s deportations against and in defiance of Judges’ orders. If the law
is important, how come the supposed “guardians” of the law are tight mouthed about these law breakers?
Also: Where is the National Council of Churches? Gone gone gone – are the righteous days of the Berrigan brothers.