Just in case you didn’t think “Signalgate” wasn’t enough of a farce, the “scandal” that didn’t even last a week in the American political imagination got an annotated treatment in The New York Times that should pretty much tell you how much “classified” information was included in the leaked chat — and why there aren’t emphatic enough air-quotes to go around each of those words.
For those of you who haven’t been following along, a recap: On Monday, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published a piece titled, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”
That’s a bit of a tonal oversell, as we would later learn, but the whole story is essentially in the title: Goldberg, a noted critic of the Trump White House, got invited to a Signal chat with high-ranking Trump administration officials in which attack plans on Houthi rebels in Yemen were being discussed. Quite the faux pas, yes, but what happened aside from that?
Goldberg assured us that what he saw was very secret, very classified, and could very much have compromised American operational efficacy had it been shared with an enemy. It included, to use his exact words, “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”
That article was published at a little past noon on Monday. Throughout that day and through the day Tuesday, members of the chat group spoke out in terms that didn’t deny the existence of the chat, but noted that Goldberg had very much oversold the nature of the information that was shared there.
“Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said.
“There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, appearing before the same committee: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”
Very well, The Atlantic said. Since that was the case, they’d publish almost all of the Signal chat — which was anticlimactic in the extreme. It contained no “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing,” as Goldberg had promised, unless by precise he meant “really vague.” (I get those two mixed up all the time.)
Did using Signal to discuss the strike amount to a real security breach?
At this point, they’d shifted headlines, too: “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal.” Notice the verbiage change; apparently, someone at The Atlantic remembered we are neither officially nor technically at war with either Yemen or the Houthis.
To make things worse, it turned out that one of his big reveals — the fact that Ratcliffe had allegedly dropped the name of “an active intelligence officer” whose identity is classified — was almost completely bogus:
WARNING: The following post contains vulgar language that some readers may find offensive.
It’s very clear Goldberg oversold what he had. But one thing in particular really stands out.
Remember when he was attacking Ratcliffe for blowing the cover for a CIA agent? Turns out Ratcliffe was simply naming his chief of staff. https://t.co/BUGbX6gZDZ
— JD Vance (@JDVance) March 26, 2025
But apparently, we needed to get all the mileage we could out of this thing — after all, “Signalgate” seemed to have such promise when it all broke on Monday! — so in came The New York Times with, “The Leaked Signal Chat, Annotated,” just so they could let you know how bad it all was.
Except they had to admit that, rather quietly, the chat Goldberg had promised us was the super-duper-secret Houthi strike secured chat wasn’t, um, the real secret chat.
Yes, apparently, a scandal sold to us on the premise that government officials were stupid enough to hold the secure classified chat for a military operation on a commercial chat application included information that indicated it wasn’t the secure classified chat. Who would have guessed it?
That info came when scrutinizing a Friday, March 14 message from White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, whose invitation to Goldberg started this whole mess off:
Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.
State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners.
Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.
The Times, in providing context as to why this particular message was important, gave us all we needed to dismiss this pseudo-scandal as unimportant.
From their annotation: “Government officials work sometimes in the ‘high side,’ which is a classified system, and the ‘low side,’ which is an unclassified government system.
“This entire conversation, however, takes place in neither the ‘high side’ nor the ‘low side,’ but in a publicly available messaging app.”
Oh.
Again, let me reiterate for like the 50th time this week: This is not to say that what happened is good. It wasn’t. Either someone or a group of someone’s screwed up bigly here, and Goldberg and the media got plenty of mileage out of that screwup.
Nobody bothered mentioning the “high side” thing. Even the Times barely touched on it before moving on.
But acknowledging that the details are on the “high side,” as Waltz said, indicated that the real stuff was elsewhere — not in an ersatz Signal group, which is how this is all being packaged and sold.
Why wasn’t this being put out on the high side? The answer is obvious, simple, and completely deflating to that narrative: It didn’t include anything that needed to be put there. There was no “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.” No classified info. No unmasking of intelligence operatives. No “war plans.”
What we had, instead, was nothing but an administrative gaffe that, with the aid of some clickable headlines, seemed like the worst thing in the world for 48 hours. Until even the New York Times’ annotators had to admit that this wasn’t the real “war plans” chat. In the end, it was more like more like a group of students texting their notes to each other before a test and accidentally including their professor. That’s it.
Thanks for coming, I guess?
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