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How did Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic end up in the infamous Signal "war plans" group chat?
Goldberg says he received an unexpected "connection request" from National Security Advisor Mike Waltz two days before Waltz added Goldberg to a group chat with senior Trump administration officials.
"On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz," Goldberg writes. "Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the 'Houthi PC small group.'"
The problem is, that's not how Signal works. You don't add or follow someone on Signal like you would on Facebook or LinkedIn. The only way to connect on Signal is to send someone a "message request." This creates a one-on-one chat with that person and requires you to type an opening message, like, "Hey, this is Mike Waltz and I shouldn't be messaging you! Lol."
The recipient gets a notification on their phone with the opening message and can accept, block, or report the sender and the chat. It's curious that Goldberg did not reveal what the initial message request said, or if he responded to it. He said only that he was wary of being scammed.
"It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me," Goldberg writes. "It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them."
Still, I'm not the only one who found the phrase "connection request" odd. "The part of the Goldberg story that he got a 'connection request' from Waltz on Mar 11, without a message, immediately rang false," writes one Bluesky user. "Every time I've gotten such a request it was because someone I wasn't connected with messaged me."
Is Goldberg Protecting One of His Sources?
Meanwhile, you contact people on Signal by typing in their phone number, typing in their Signal username, or selecting their name from a list of contacts in your phone who are also on Signal. But no matter which option you choose, you still need to start a private chat.
How did Waltz have Goldberg's contact information? Was he one of Goldberg's sources? Since The Atlantic is a politics-focused publication, it's not an unreasonable assumption.
"I have met [Waltz] in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically," Goldberg writes in his story.
If the two had already been speaking, there would be no "message request" pre-requisite to add Goldberg to the group chat. This would make it easy for Waltz to accidentally select the reporter since his name appears alphabetically after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (Ga - Go). The screenshots below show the process of creating a group chat in Signal.
A more benign theory is that the story was written or edited to exclude the minutiae of how Signal works; The Atlantic is not a tech publication, and the meat of the story is the information that Trump officials, particularly Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, shared on an insecure channel. It would be a blockbuster story no matter the app, be it Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp.
We reached out to The Atlantic and Signal for more clarity on the use of the term "connection request," and will update this story if we hear back.
For their part, White House officials have released conflicting or confusing statements. In a Fox News interview, Waltz said Goldberg's number was saved in his phone, but under a different name. He then said questioned whether Goldberg added himself to the chat by "some other technical mean." (Unlikely.) He didn't say how he initially connected with Goldberg on Signal and Fox News host Laura Ingraham didn't push the issue.
President Trump doesn't seem to understand how Signal works, calling the chat a "call." In an interview with NBC News, he blamed a Waltz staffer for the snafu. “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone," Trump said. "A staffer had his number on there." Waltz, however, says, "I take full responsibility. I built the group. My job is to make sure everything is coordinated.”
Not to worry, Trump has put Elon Musk on the case. Musk's "technical experts [will] figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat," says White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.