OK a group chat included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg. The chat discussed the political implications of an attack by the United States on the terrorist group known as the Houthis and was designed to be between high level government officials. The Houthis are a radical Islamic terrorist group They started out rebelling against the government in Yemen and have been for years attacking shipping entering or exiting the Red Sea from the Suez Canal. Houthis use weapons supplied by Iran to disrupt commercial traffic that supplies a large percentage of good to the world.

So why has the United States only now acted? This was not the first strike by the U.S. just the latest. What is the problem with the leak from the Atlantic and why was Goldberg even on the chat.

The questions that must be answered are whether Goldbergs’ inclusion was a mistake or intentional? How much of what was in the chat classified? 

To answer the last question from Waltz’s text on March 14, per the New York Times, he advised the group that the Presidents guidance would be in their high side inboxes. High side is government speak for classified, and reading through the rest of the messages there was nothing that could be called classified. What was released would at best been noted as sensitive but not classified, yes there is a classification for things that are not classified. So, what do we know? There was classified material provided between the principals but not in the signal text. So, to that point there were no war plans or other secrets discussed on signal.

Now to the inclusion of Goldberg. It was either intentional or unintentional, so which was it? We do not know and may never know so the following is speculation based on a lifetime of being in the IC and studying history.

It may have been unintentional but how? Why would Goldberg even be on Waltz’s contact list? If he was on the contact list, which would have allowed for his inclusion in the group, or the list of some staffer who added him to Waltz’s contact list by mistake. To accept this scenario requires the belief that a number of mistakes were made within the confines of the NSC and no one caught it in time. I would say the odds of this are less than 10%.

The more likely scenario is that Goldberg was added intentionally for an unknown reason. The first and most likely reason is that someone wanted to embarrass Waltz or cause harm. It must be remembered that this administration has only been in office for a little over two months. There is likely many in holdovers that are not happy. If this is the case, they will be found. A second but less likely scenario is that for some reason the administration wanted the information to leak or for it to find its way to allies or enemies. A similar use of a journalist was during the Cuban missile crises when both the U.S. and the Soviet Union used ABC News correspondent John Scali to pass backdoor messages. This is unlikely as Scali was an ally of Kennedy and Goldberg is an enemy of Trump. Be more interested in

In any case we need to wait and see what facts come out as there has been nothing to date other than the Signal Chat was passed to Goldberg, and the Houthis were hit. We should in fairness to all parties since nothing classified was passed and lesions learned we need to all just sit back and Pleasethink.