The Atlantic's David Graham interviewed editor Jeffrey Goldberg about the Signal group chat story

[highplainsdem]

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/03/jeffrey-goldberg-group-chat-military-houthi-yemen/682160/

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Jeffrey: No, nothing like this. This was like an intravenous drip of information that no one in the government thinks journalists should have. Until almost the very last minute, I could not believe that this was actually happening, that there could be a Mack-truck-size breach, that somehow, the editor in chief of The Atlantic was invited into a conversation with the intelligence agencies, secretaries, the national security adviser. Like most reporters, I’ve been a recipient of leaks. A leak is a totally different thing. That’s a whistleblower trying to make complaints. This is just reckless.

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Jeffrey: The actual conversation that they have is fascinating, and in a certain way impressive. It’s nice to see that they’re disagreeing with one another. It’s very useful for the public to know that the vice president has a more hands-off approach than other members of the administration. One of the things that I found interesting was that when a person named “S M” in the chat, who I took to be Stephen Miller, comes in and says, “As I heard it, the president was clear,” this kind of shuts down the conversation. It suggests that Stephen Miller can be in a conversation with, among others, the vice president of the United States and still can get his way. (Miller did not reply to a request for comment or confirm that he is “S M.”)

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Jeffrey: This is an interesting question: Are they using Signal because it’s convenient? Are they using Signal because it disappears? According to the experts Shane interviewed, the administration should not have established a Signal thread for such conversations in the first place, but once it did, what one is supposed to do legally is copy an official government account, and that government account will then send these threads to the National Archives for posterity, for research, for accountability. But if you’re using a disappearing-text app, I don’t know. That’s one of the questions that I’ve asked and have not gotten answered yet.

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Jeffrey: It’s not my role to care about the possibility of threats or retaliation. We just have to come to work and do our jobs to the best of our ability. Unfortunately, in our society today—we see this across corporate journalism and law firms and other industries—there’s too much preemptive obeying for my taste. All we can do is just go do our jobs.

[SheltieLover]

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