White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump Administration has the right man to investigate how The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg ended up in a group chat where officials discussed military strikes in Yemen: Elon Musk.
Leavitt, during a press briefing on Wednesday, said Musk has volunteered to get to the bottom of the situation.
“Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat, again to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” Leavitt said.
Musk and his tech team may not need to spend too much time on the case, however. The Atlantic on Wednesday published screenshots of the Signal group chat Goldberg was added to — which included a screenshot showing national security advisor “Michael Waltz added you to the group.”
Leavitt’s comment is the latest twist in the ongoing saga that started on Monday, when Goldberg published a report in The Atlantic on how he was accidentally added to a group chat in which Trump officials discussed “imminent war plans.”
The inadvertent messages, shared via the encrypted messaging app Signal, were sent to Goldberg in the days leading up to the U.S. launching air and naval strikes against the Houthis in Yemen. The strikes were made “in an effort to open international shipping lanes in the Red Sea that the Houthis have disrupted for months with their own attacks,” The New York Times reported on March 15, the day the strikes took place.
The messages show the back-and-forth discussion between Trump Administration officials over whether the U.S. should strike the Houthis now or wait until April or later. There were 18 people included in the group chat, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Goldberg.
The Trump Administration has looked to minimize the incident since then. On Tuesday, President Trump said Waltz had “learned a lesson.” The president added that he believed Goldberg’s presence in the group chat had “no impact at all,” and that it was his administration’s “only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.”
Leavitt, earlier on Wednesday, dismissed The Atlantic’s latest report showing the screenshotted messages. She posted on X the story was “another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”
