Trump Adviser Lied About Not Knowing Atlantic Editor in Group Chat

Republicans have been caught in yet another lie about the war plans group chat.

After The Atlantic reported Monday that members of Trump’s Cabinet discussed U.S. military plans in a Signal chat that accidentally included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, who is being blamed for adding Goldberg to the group, claimed he has never met the journalist. He’s lying, and there’s a photo to prove it.

“There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves making up lies about this president,” Waltz told reporters Tuesday. “Whether it’s the Russia hoax or making up lies about Gold Star families, and this one in particular I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with, and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” Waltz said, referring to Goldberg.

“Wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, if I saw him in a police lineup,” Waltz maintained again in a Fox News interview later that evening.

But Lawfare editor Anna Bower shared an image on X Wednesday of Waltz and Goldberg standing next to each other at an event at the French Embassy in 2021. “The event Waltz attended—a Q&A with a French filmmaker—was moderated by Goldberg,” Bower writes.

In The Atlantic’s original report, Goldberg wrote that he has met Waltz before, though he didn’t specify where. The messages in the chat with Waltz, which also included Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, contained sensitive details about the timing of an American airstrike and location of missile strikes against the Houthis in Yemen.

Like Waltz, the rest of the GOP has desperately tried to downplay the incident, spewing a number of lies to smear The Atlantic’s credibility. The White House claimed that no “classified information” or “war plans” were shared in the group chat, despite Hegseth revealing the exact timing of the airstrikes and U.S. aircraft used ahead of time.

It’s a colossal slipup, and Trump’s team is trying to lie its way through it.

The man whose word the Trump administration is swearing by refuses to speak.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth still refuses to give a straight answer on when exactly he declassified the plans he shared in a Signal group chat to attack Yemen.

Full text messages from the group chat, which included The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, were released Wednesday and showed sensitive government information was shared, including timing of the airstrikes on Yemen.

“Mr. Secretary, did you share strike plans before they launched? Mr. Secretary, how do you square what you said with what your messages show?” a reporter asked Hegseth Wednesday afternoon. He walked away silently.

“Did you share classified information? Did you declassify that information before you put it in the chat?” Hegseth continued to ignore the questions.

Hegseth’s refusal to answer comes just hours after Representative Johnny Gomez asked CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard if Hegseth—whom he referred to as “the main person involved in this thread”— was drunk when he sent the messages regarding Yemen in the chat.

On Monday, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that Mike Waltz had added him to a Signal chat with Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and multiple other defense Cabinet members. Hegseth called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” when asked about it on Monday.

“We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should,” Hegseth wrote in the chat. “This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered.”

If these attack plans—which Republicans are framing as just a chill, regular conversation—were truly unclassified long ago, the defense secretary should have no issue saying that plainly.

The Trump administration is continuing its witch hunt of international students whose political views it disagrees with, this time at Tufts University.

On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University with a valid F-1 visa, was detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials while on her way to meet with friends to break her Ramadan fast, according to a statement from her lawyer.

A video of Ozturk’s kidnapping shows six ICE agents forcibly removing Ozturk’s backpack, placing her hands behind her back, and putting her in a dark-grey SUV, which then drives away. In a cowardly display of power, all of the agents covered their faces with masks.

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” said Ozturk’s lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai. “No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of.”

Tufts University said it was not made aware of Ozturk’s kidnapping before it happened but was later notified that her visa had been revoked.

U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani on Tuesday had ordered that Ozturk should not be moved out of Massachusetts “without providing advance notice of the intended move” providing reason in writing for why “such a movement is necessary.”

Last spring, Ozturk co-authored an opinion essay in the student newspaper that demanded Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from companies tied to Israel.

“The university had no pre-knowledge of this incident and did not share any information with federal authorities prior to the event, and the location where this took place is not affiliated with Tufts University,” the statement reads. “We realize that tonight’s news will be distressing to some members of our community, particularly the members of our international community.”

Ozturk is just the latest valid visa holder to be targeted by the Trump administration for supporting Palestine. Earlier this month, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate from Columbia University who participated in pro-Palestinian protests at the university, was unlawfully detained by ICE. DHS has since detained at least two more international students with visas for their protesting of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a clear violation of First Amendment rights.

Donald Trump’s sinister plan to deport noncitizens under the Alien Enemies Act included several steps specifically designed to help evade judicial review, Talking Points Memo reported Wednesday.

It all began weeks before the secretive deportations on March 15 took place, when Trump entered office and immediately signed an executive order labeling Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization. This helped to set the stage for the president to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, suspending alleged members’ due process to deport them.

As soon as early February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement began arresting Venezuelan asylum-seekers. In several cases, individuals were detained at their regular check-ins with federal authorities and brought into ICE custody on the basis of their supposedly suspicious tattoos.

“From there, no further due process or examination to determine whether these people were actually TdA members appears to have taken place,” TPM reported.

The White House claimed that authorities had determined beyond a doubt that the more than 100 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador earlier were “terrorist” members of the TdA but refused to reveal operational details of how they were able to determine this. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan claimed that authorities had used social media, surveillance, sworn statements from gang members, and wire taps to determine supposed gang affiliation.

Over the course of the next month, the alleged members of TdA were slowly moved closer and closer to the airfield in South Texas where the flights to El Salvador departed, according to multiple immigration attorneys who spoke with TPM.

One soon-to-be deported Venezuelan missed an immigration court hearing in Elizabeth, New Jersey, because he had been inexplicably moved to a detention facility in South Texas. Others were moved from Pennsylvania, California, and Louisiana. Attorneys struggled to keep track of their clients as they were slowly arranged, ahead of Trump’s invocation of the AEA, like dominoes to fall.

The night before the flights took off, the Venezuelans received misleading information about where they were actually going. One group was placed on an aircraft and told they were going back to Venezuela.

Attorney Martin Rosenow was in disbelief when he received a tearful phone call from his client’s wife, saying her husband was being deported back to Venezuela.

“For me, it was impossible, because he still had an open asylum pending and you can’t be deported without being given due process. So at first I told her, ‘You know what? I think he’s just being transferred to another facility because his case is still ongoing,’” Rosenow told TPM. “It’s impossible that he’d be deported.”

Both Rosenow and the family were left confused and unprepared to challenge his client’s subsequent deportation to a torture prison in El Salvador.

Crucially, family members and attorneys were not made aware of the removal of their loved ones and clients, making it impossible to challenge their removal.

John Dutton, an attorney for one of the Venezuelan nationals, told TPM that it seemed to him that every move had been purposefully orchestrated. “They knew that what they were doing was wrong,” Dutton said. “The way they did it, how they did it, in the middle of the night, how they didn’t allow them to tell their families. They didn’t tell them. They didn’t tell us as attorneys.”

Still, rumors that Trump had invoked the AEA circulated, and at 2 a.m. on March 15, Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney, filed suit to block their removals. While the White House said the AEA order was signed on March 14, it did not appear on the government’s website until 3:53 p.m. the next day.

Within only hours of its posting, two flights departed, carrying more than 100 Venezuelans nationals, who had not been afforded their due process rights to a hearing, out of the country.

All of these measures indicate that the government took extensive steps to strip noncitizens of their rights ahead of their deportation. As Judge James Boasberg wrote in an order Monday, the speed at which the deportees were removed “implied a desire to circumvent judicial review.”

Representative Chrissy Houlahan cornered National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard during a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, committing the intelligence chief to “follow the law” and investigate the Trump administration’s Signal leak regarding plans to attack Houthi targets in Yemen.

“This committee established something called 50 USC 3235a, and this committee—on a bipartisan, a-partisan basis—requires you, the DNI, to swiftly notify Congress and the Intelligence Committee if you’re aware of any sort of significant unauthorized disclosure or compromise of classified information, which I would argue has all the markings of being that,” Houlahan said. “And so, if you as the DNI chief see such a thing, anywhere within your organizations of purview, you have an obligation to report back to us on that.

“Would this qualify to you as something worthy of that investigation?” Houlahan pressed.

Gabbard deferred that responsibility to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claiming that only he had the authority to classify Defense Department information.

“This chat did not have the auspice of being a DOD chat. There’s no such thing as labeling it as DOD. This was a chat among a great variety of people,” Houlahan retorted, pressing that Gabbard had a legal obligation to report and investigate leaked information.

“Do you not think it’s important to do such a thing?” Houlahan said.

“The National Security Council is investigating this inadvertent leak,” Gabbard said, referring to the probe fronted by national security adviser Mike Waltz, the Trump admin official responsible for creating the Signal chat room and adding The Atlantic’s editor in chief in the first place.

The former Democratic presidential candidate then proceeded to point her finger back at Hegseth, before Houlahan cut Gabbard off to argue that Hegseth should “walk his resignation in” and is “probably headed toward being relieved of his duty based on what I think are significant and illegal leaks.

“I would like it if you would please commit to this organization that you will follow the law, and I would like it if you would also investigate what is likely to be more than just this chat, because if there’s one, there’s more than one. If there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Houlahan continued. “Would you please commit yourself to that investigation?”

“Congresswoman, yes, I will follow the law,” Gabbard said.

Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat, is an Air Force veteran and serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as the House Armed Services Committee.