The Left and Media Smell Blood in Water with ‘SignalGate’… But Here’s the Real Story

Updated March 27, 2025 at 5:15pm ET

The left and corporate media remain consumed with what has now been dubbed “SignalGate” as they demand heads roll for the Trump administration group chat about the U.S. strikes against Houthi terrorists that the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, found himself added to.

After Goldberg proclaimed he would not publish the full contents of the messages due to national security concerns, he quickly did an about-face – as Megyn predicted – and released them on Wednesday. That has only further fueled the breathless reporting on the subject.

On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by the hosts of Ruthless – Josh Holmes, Comfortably Smug, Michael Duncan, and John Ashbrook – to discuss why this story continues to get so much attention from the media and even the White House and what it is really all about.

Original article from March 25, 2025 below:

The editor in chief of The Atlantic shocked Washington Monday with a piece about how he found himself in a text chain with Trump administration officials who were discussing upcoming military strikes in Yemen.

In the bombshell article headlined “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” Jeffrey Goldberg claimed he was added by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to a Signal group chat with senior members of the Trump team. National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes later confirmed the authenticity of the messages to Goldberg and ABC News. 

On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by the hosts of America This Week, Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi, to discuss the strange circumstances of the security breach and the theories about what happened.

The Report

Goldberg’s involvement in the security breach began on March 11 when he got a Signal message from a user identified as “Michael Waltz.” He admitted he had doubts about whether it was the national security adviser, and his suspicions grew when he got added to a Signal group called “Houthi PC small group” on March 13.

In Washington speak, “PC” stands for “principals committee” and usually refers to the group of top officials and Cabinet heads associated with national security-related issues. Goldberg said Waltz sent a message to the group saying he was putting together this “PC small group” to talk about the Houthis because action against the terrorist group was imminent.

While Goldberg said he thought he was being punked, he soon learned the truth. “The world found out shortly before 2 pm eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen,” he wrote. “I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 am The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”

In the article, Goldberg outlined days of internal communications he saw on the encrypted messaging app, which also included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance among other high-ranking officials. The Trump team reportedly engaged in a nuanced policy discussion weighing the pros and cons of launching the attack on the Houthis.

Days after the bombings, Goldberg said Hegseth sent a followup message to the group that he chose not to publish. “I will not quote from this update or from certain other subsequent texts,” he wrote. “The information contained in them if they had been read by an adversary of the United States could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel.”

The Reaction

The breach is raising questions about the handling of sensitive information. The National Security Council is now investigating how a journalist was added to the group message with no one seeming to notice, and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee grilled CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday.

Both Gabbard and Ratcliffe maintained no classified information was shared in the messages Goldberg saw, and President Donald Trump told reporters he is standing by Waltz. “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” the president said.

Megyn said Trump struck the right tone in his defense of Waltz given how the situation ultimately unfolded. “Now the left is treating this like we had a nuclear meltdown as a result of inappropriate group messaging on Signal,” she said. “This is not Watergate. It’s not the Pentagon Papers. People need to calm the eff down.”

“The mission they were discussing when we fought back against the Houthis in Yemen was a huge success,” she continued. “It could have gone poorly if Mike Waltz had cc’d, like, Iran… but it didn’t get linked to anybody other than a guy [in Goldberg] who hates Republicans but doesn’t necessarily hate America because he did nothing to undermine the mission.”

With that said, Megyn noted she would have approached the communications surrounding the breach a little differently. “If I were the administration, I think I would have just said, ‘We made a mistake, we’ll look at how it happened, and we’ll let you know who you know. Thank God nothing bad came out of it and it was on an encrypted channel… but we can shore up our communications and we will,'” she explained.

End Game

While Megyn said the inclusion of Goldberg was “clearly erroneous,” Taibbi wasn’t so sure. “I need to know a little bit more about how this story happened before I can accurately comment on it because the notion that, of all people in the world, the journalist who is probably most hostile to Donald Trump was added to this chat chain about an attack on Yemen is so incredibly improbable that the circumstances of it need to be understood,” he said. “Something about it doesn’t smell entirely kosher to me.”

There has been speculation on social media that perhaps someone added Goldberg to try to make the Trump administration look bad, but Megyn believes it did the opposite. “I think to the contrary, it made them all look very thoughtful. They’re debating the pros and cons,” she said. “The actual chatter did not make them look bad. It was simply the fact that it was happening on Signal, and they added Jeffrey Goldberg.”

Taibbi agreed. “The security leak is obviously not great, and it’s going to invite criticisms that these people are inexperienced and don’t know what they’re doing,” he concluded. “But I think the administration comes out looking not so bad… It’s not like you had a bunch of people saying, ‘Wait, where’s Yemen again?’ I mean, they seemed to know what they were doing.”

You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Kirn and Taibbi by tuning in to episode 1,034 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.