The Atlantic has shared more screenshots from the now-infamous Signal group chat that featured top officials from the US Donald Trump’s administration.
On 24 March, the editor-in-chief of the American publication The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, said that he was added to a closed Signal messenger chat where officials from the Donald Trump administration discussed strikes in Yemen.
According to Goldberg, Trump’s national security advisor Mike Waltz added him to the group. Waltz, alongside others in the administration, acknowledged that the chat was real, adding that while he wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, he found it puzzling that Goldberg, who “lied about the President”,‘somehow’ got ‘sucked into’ the Signal chat.
Goldberg’s screenshot provides an answer to how he was ‘somehow’ ‘sucked into’ the group: Mike Waltz added him.
The subsequent messages include a detailed war plan from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sent out in order to “update the team.” Hegseth is also the only person in the group who used a profile pic while communicating on Signal with others.
Following the update, other bigwigs from Trump’s administration, like Vice President J.D. Vance, stepped in to “say a prayer for victory,” to which two group members reacted with a praying emoji. After that, Mike Waltz set the disappearing message time to 4 weeks for the information to be stored on the server for an additional three weeks.
Later, he reported about the progress of the attack. Because he “typed too fast”, Vance was confused as to what the message on “building collapsed” meant before clarifying that one of the targets got killed because he visited a girlfriend. Vance approved of the measure, dubbing it “excellent.”
Other members of the group chat joined in on the praise, with Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Special Envoy to Russia who believes that Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev “gave 5 regions to Ukraine,” the names of which he couldn’t fully remember, sending a unique emoji set that included two praying signs, one flexing biceps emoji, and two American flags.
This move complements the earlier set of emojis sent by Waltz that includes a fist in the face, an American flag, and a fire emoji, usually sent as a reaction in response to hot pictures posted in stories on social media.
The new screenshots refute Hegseth’s earlier claims that no sensitive information was sent in the group chat, which White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Director of National Intel Tulsi Gabbard echoed.
