Eleven things to note about the Signalgate fightback

From the moment the Signalgate story broke – in which the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was invited into a group chat that kept top Trump administration officials intimately briefed on impending attacks on Houthi rebels – the White House has been wishing it would go away.

So what? It hasn’t. The story is too wild, too telling, too confounding to die, so the administration has had to close ranks and try to neutralise it with a familiar mix of lies, dissembling, distortion, defamation – and truth.

Here are eleven highlights from the case for the defence, with notes:

1 — “I’ve heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans.” US defence secretary Pete Hegseth in Hawaii on Monday 24 March

• By any reasonable standard someone was texting war plans, and his name was Pete Hegseth. There is a more detailed type of military-to-military plan known as an OPLAN which can run to thousands of technical pages, but nine expert sources tell Politifact what Hegseth shared with colleagues about aircraft and missile types and the timing of bomb runs amounted to war plans.

2 — “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes… to include the hoaxes of “Russia Russia Russia” or the “fine people on both sides” hoax or the “suckers and losers hoax”. This is the guy that peddles in garbage.” Pete Hegseth, also on Monday

• Goldberg is in fact a highly respected editor who’s turned the Atlantic into a powerhouse of mainstream investigative journalism. Hegseth’s “hoaxes” are three of the most damaging stories to appear about Trump in his first presidential term, contributing to his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden. In one, four sources told Goldberg Trump refused to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery on a D-Day anniversary trip to France because the 1,800 US Marines buried there were “suckers and losers”.

3 — “We’ve been managing four years of deferred maintenance [in the Red Sea]”. Pete Hegseth, also on Monday

• Hegseth is trying to change the subject by alleging neglect by Team Biden of the Houthi threat to Red Sea shipping. In reality in 2024 alone, mainly US forces with some UK help mounted a total of 276 airstrikes on Houthi targets, destroying 326 mobile weapons systems and hundreds more static ones.

4 —“The Biden Administration sat back as a band of pirates… exacted a toll system in one of the most important shipping lanes in the world.” White House press release, 25 March.

• This is partly true. Biden didn’t exactly sit back (see above), but Houthi attacks reduced the volume of shipping using the Red Sea last year by 73 per cent, raised insurance rates ten-fold and forced hundreds of ships to sail round Africa instead, adding 20 per cent to the cost of moving a container from Asia to Europe.

5 — “No classified material was sent to the thread.” Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, 25 March

• Not true. What was shared was highly sensitive and therefore classified, the former White House and Pentagon official Ilan Goldenberg tells Politico.

6 —“It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released… What we should be talking about is, it was a very successful mission.” Pam Bondi, US Attorney General, 27 March

• This is Bondi’s signal that as the top US law enforcement officer she won’t be prosecuting anyone for including Goldberg in the chat, even if her reading of the law is wrong.

7 —“I wasn’t involved with it. I wasn’t there.” President Trump, 26 March

• If by “there” he means the group chat, this is true.

8 — “Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this.” President Trump, 24 March

• Hegseth had everything to do with it apart from setting up the group chat in the first place. All the detailed military information came from his office.

9 — “I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic. To me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business.” President Trump, 24 March

• Trump’s information is out of date. The Atlantic was $20 million in the red four years ago but is now profitable and hiring after posting revenues of $100 million last year.

10 — “It could be that Signal’s not very good. It’s a company.” President Trump, 26 March

• Not true. Signal is not a company. According to the Business of Apps website it’s a non-profit dedicated to open-source privacy technology.

11 — “Someone made a big mistake.” Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, 26 March

• True.

What’s more… Dave Portney, a multimillionaire admirer of Trump’s, says: “Somebody has to go down for this.” Good luck with that.