Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired back at The Atlantic after it published the entirety of the “really s--tty war plans” Donald Trump’s top aides accidentally leaked to a reporter.
Hegseth tried to defend the claim he made on Tuesday that “nobody was texting war plans” in the Signal group chat to which National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor-in-chief.
“So, let’s [sic] me get this straight,” the top Pentagon official wrote on X. “The Atlantic released the so-called ‘war plans’ and those ‘plans’ include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.”
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“Those are some really s--tty war plans,” he added. “This only proves one thing: Jeff Goldberg has never seen a war plan or an ‘attack plan’ (as he now calls it). Not even close.”
He added that all Goldberg—who before becoming the paper’s editor earned acclaim as a foreign correspondent—had done was “peddle hoaxes.”
The texts published by The Atlantic show that Hegseth gave those in the chat a half-hour advance notice of when a U.S. strike on the Houthi terrorist group in Yemen would hit. In the same message, he also previewed the timing for the subsequent strikes that hit over the next several hours.
A U.S. defense official told CNN that the information Hegseth shared was “highly classified” at the time that he shared it.
“These are operational plans that are highly classified in order to protect the servicemembers,” the unnamed source said.
Hegseth reiterated his response to The Atlantic publishing the texts during a brief media availability in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Wednesday.
“Nobody’s texting war plans,” said the secretary, wearing a camo ball cap emblazoned with a large American flag. “I noticed this morning, out came something that didn’t look like war plans.”
After dismissing the Atlantic report, Hegseth declined to take any follow-up questions and abruptly exited up a flight of stairs to his jet as reporters shouted questions about the leak to his back.
Out of national security concerns, Goldberg had opted in his original story not to publish the messages from the chat in full, given the sensitive details.
However, Goldberg decided to release the texts after a number of officials in the group chat—including Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—insisted that no war plans or classified information had been shared.
On Tuesday, while denying Goldberg’s claims about the contents of the chat, Hegseth said, “I know exactly what I’m doing, exactly what we’re directing, and I’m really proud of what we accomplished, the successful missions that night and going forward.”
Later that day, Goldberg called Hegseth’s denial “a lie” and suggested that his magazine would consider publishing the texts in full.
While many of the Cabinet-level officials in the group chat have been testifying to Congress about the incident, no one has yet stepped down—despite calls from critics.
Trump has publicly stood by his team, including Waltz, who has taken “full responsibility” for the error.
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” the president told NBC News on Tuesday.
