Why did Jeffrey Goldberg leave the 'bomb Yemen' Signal chat?

With momentum for a strike on Iran building within the Trump White House, Goldberg was apparently summoned to move the neocon message. And he wound up with more access than he could handle.

By Max Blumenthal

Atlantic Magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg has won the admiration of his Beltway peers for the conduct he displayed after being accidentally invited into a smoke-filled “bomb Yemen” Signal chat with Trump’s national security honchos and top advisors. “Props to Jeffrey Goldberg for his high standards as a professional journalist,” declared Ian Bremmer, the trans-Atlanticist foreign policy pundit on his Bank of America-sponsored GZero podcast. “When he realized the conversation was authentic he immediately left, informed the relevant senior official, and made the public aware without disclosing intelligence that could damage the United States.”

But what exactly did Goldberg do to deserve such high praise?

With a once in a lifetime opportunity to view and report on high level discussions on the US launching an illegal war on Yemen, Goldberg chose to avert his gaze and leave the scene as soon as he could, apparently because maintaining such unparalleled access would have compelled him to report on discussions that might have complicated a war being waged on behalf of the Israeli apartheid state to which he emigrated as a young man. Instead of exploiting his front row seat to the Trump admin's war planning - a vantage point that would have yielded countless scoops and a bestselling book for any adversarial journalist - Goldberg bolted and dutifully informed the White House about the unfortunate situation.

From there, the story became a palace intrigue over an embarrassing failure of “opsec,” or operational security, and not one about the policy itself, which entails a gargantuan empire bombarding a poor, besieged country because it is controlled by a popular movement that is currently the only force on the planet taking up arms to stop Israel's genocide in Gaza.

In the fourth paragraph of Goldberg's Atlantic article about the principals' Signal group, he strongly implied that he supports the war's objectives, describing Ansar Allah, or the Houthis, as an "Iran-backed terrorist organization" which upholds a belief system that is (what else?) antisemitic. Given Goldberg’s admission that Waltz first reached out to him at least two days prior to mistakenly adding him to the Signal group, it appears the NSC director had been leaking to the Atlantic editor on behalf of the neocon faction in the Trump White House. And it seems clear why Waltz would have sought to cultivate Goldberg.

During the run-up to to the Iraq war, then-Vice President Dick Cheney cited Goldberg’s bunk reporting alleging deep ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda during multiple media appearances hyping up the coming invasion. Under Obama, Goldberg served as Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s errand boy, churning out tall tales about Tel Aviv’s imminent plan to attack Iran’s nuclear sites – unless the US did it first. Since the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, the once-failing Atlantic has suddenly turned a profit, as Goldberg unleashed a firehose of propaganda against the keffiyeh-clad enemies of the magazine’s Upper East Side donor base. This month, with momentum for a strike on Iran building within the Trump White House, Goldberg was summoned once again move to the neocon message, and wound up with more access than he bargained for.

When asked in a March 24 interview with CNN's Kaitlan Collins why he left the Trump principals’ Signal group voluntarily, Goldberg ducked the question. But as Ian Bremmer suggested, he did so out of deference to power and an abiding belief in a US empire hellbent on protecting Israel. And in the culture of Beltway access journalism, that's considered a laudable trait.