Trump’s national security team leaked attack plan to reporter before bombing Yemen

The phone buzzed in Jeffrey Goldberg’s pocket, and just like that, he knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming”.

He knew before the bombs fell, before the jets screamed over Yemen, before the whole damn world found out.

Because there it was, right on his screen—Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense himself, laying out the war plan like he was texting takeout orders. Targets. Weapons. Timing. All of it.

Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, a guy who’d been called worse by this administration, was suddenly in the room where it happened—except the room was a Signal chat, and the room shouldn’t have existed at all.

Hegseth tapped out the details at 11:44 a.m. Eastern. The first bombs would drop at 1:45.

Goldberg sat in his car in a supermarket parking lot and waited, because what else do you do when the government accidentally hands you its playbook? Two hours later, right on schedule, the sky over Sana’a lit up. Somewhere in the White House, somebody finally realized they’d invited a reporter to the war council.

“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” Hegseth had written, like a man who didn’t just spill state secrets into a journalist’s lap.

Operational security. A joke. The kind of thing that gets you fired, or worse, except nobody gets fired in the administration, unless they are qualified and doing really important work.

The boss spent years screaming about Hillary’s emails, but that was when the same guys now shrugging this off once acted like a misplaced folder was treason.

Vance criticized Trump’s judgment in the leaked group chat in which senior administration officials discussed the American military strikes against targets in Yemen.

Vance didn’t want the strikes. He said the public wouldn’t get it, that nobody knew who the Houthis were, that the whole thing was a gamble.

Hegseth shot back that they had to move fast, that Israel might beat them to it, that the real trick was selling it—make it about Biden’s failures, make it about Iran’s money.

All of this typed out in real time, tapped into phones, sent into the ether, where nobody knows who else might’ve been watching.

The White House called it an accident, a slip of the finger, a wrong number in the chain. They called it “thoughtful policy coordination.”

What it was, was the kind of screwup that gets people killed, the kind of thing they’d have roasted the other side for, if the other side had done it.

But the other side didn’t. Trump’s side did.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that the Trump administration will aggressively investigate people in U.S. spy agencies who leak information on national security topics to the public.

Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged in a top-secret discussion without a secure system and they invited a journalist to the chat.

So Goldberg sat in his car and watched the clock. The bombs fell. The chat kept buzzing. And somewhere out there, in the desert on the other side of the world, men with guns and grudges might’ve been reading along too.

Gabbard provided no details about how the Trump administration intends to stop disclosures of sensitive national security information, a problem that has vexed past presidents.

“Unfortunately, such leaks have become commonplace with no investigation or accountability. That ends now,” Gabbard said. “We know of and are aggressively pursuing recent leakers from within the Intelligence Community and will hold them accountable.”

“If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen,” said Sen. Jack Reed, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat. “Military operations need to be handled with utmost discretion, using approved, secure lines of communication, because American lives are on the line. The carelessness shown by President Trump’s cabinet is stunning and dangerous. I will be seeking answers from the administration immediately.”

The likes of John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis and H. R. McMaster served Trump through his first term.

Kelly, a retired Marine general who was the Trump White House’s longest-serving chief of staff, said his former boss fits the definition of a fascist.

Tillerson tried to knock down a report that he had called Trump a “moron” but his refusal to directly deny it was accepted as confirmation of the rumor. Tillerson discovered he had been fired as secretary of state when he read Trump’s tweet on the morning of March 13, 2018.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” wrote Mattis, the esteemed Marine general who resigned as secretary of defense in December 2018 to protest Trump’s Syria policy. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.”

McMaster says he could not understand Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “hold” on Trump.

It would have been smart to keep this proven team together, but there is no room for patriots this time. Competence is a disqualifier.

Some members of the current war council believe Trump is an imbecile or a fascist, but they won’t stand up to the guy.

“He is a con artist,” said Rubio during the 2016 campaign. “He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy.” Vance in 2016 said Trump was unfit for the nation’s highest office and he could be “America’s Hitler.”