“The Breakfast Club” co-host DJ Envy on Tuesday challenged The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s decision to publish a piece detailing how he had been accidentally included in a group chat with cabinet officials on the Signal messaging platform.
Goldberg identified or inferred the presence of officials such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Vice President J.D. Vance in the group chat titled “Houthi PC small group,” where there was discussion of plans to bomb the Houthis, according to the editor-in-chief’s piece published on Monday. Envy questioned Goldberg’s decision to publish the story on the “Front Page News” segment of his show, arguing it could harm America.
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“You know what I don’t understand? I understand if you did get those texts, right, and you know those texts weren’t supposed to be to you, why would you put it out there?” Envy asked. “Like, that’s what I don’t understand. Like, you are a journalist, but this is your country. And you know releasing some of that stuff can probably or might affect some of the things that happen. Why would you put that out there?”
Co-host Loren LoRosa responded by saying Goldberg published the piece because of how “big” of a story it was. Envy agreed, but suggested “it could affect military” before LoRosa cut him off.
“Nobody cares about that,” she said. “Because you want to get — you have bylines, you want to get the clicks, you want to sensationalize.”
“Don’t care about people, huh? They care more about likes and TikTok numbers?” Envy asked.
LoRosa doubled down on the fact that journalists care about getting reach on their articles.
“But also, too, I think depending on where that journalist sits politically, like, it’s kind of like exposing how careless — or I think that’s what they were trying to do — exposing how careless an administration could be, which is also dangerous,” she added. “So, maybe that’s their way of saying, ‘Yo, if I care about my people, like y’all need to know. Y’all president and his administration are accidentally sending something that’s serious.”
Goldberg did withhold some of the content of the conversation to preserve national security interests, he asserted in his piece.
“At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled ‘Pete Hegseth’ posted in Signal a ‘TEAM UPDATE.’ I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” he wrote of a March 15 message he said he received. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility.”
However, he wrote that Hegseth’s message “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
White House National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes told the Daily Caller Monday they believed the communications were authentic. He also said they were investigating how Goldberg’s number was added to the group chat.
“The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials,” Hughes said in a statement provided to the Caller. “The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to our service members or our national security.”
Journalist Mark Halperin said on “The Morning Meeting” Tuesday that he would have left the group chat had he been added to it.
“If it was a private chain of proprietary information, I’d get right off of it,” he asserted.
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