STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Jeffrey Goldberg is on the line with us. He is editor in chief of The Atlantic and is the journalist added to that Signal group chat detailing attacks in Yemen. Jeffrey, good morning.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Good morning.
INSKEEP: I thought of reaching out to you on Signal this morning, but thought, better not.
GOLDBERG: I haven't heard that joke before.
INSKEEP: I'm sure you haven't. Not at all.
GOLDBERG: (Laughter).
INSKEEP: Does this finding sound about right to you - that Hegseth shared sensitive information that could have endangered a military operation?
GOLDBERG: Yes. Exactly. And it's interesting that there's still an inspector general in the government who's willing to call out the boss. I thought that was unusual. The - it's very obvious, and it was obvious to me all along, that this was highly secret information being shared in this chat. There were two problems with the chat. One, that it was happening in a commercial messaging app. And the second was that they didn't know who they had added into the chat - namely me - and, you know, violating basic rules of good digital hygiene. The finding sounds - again, we haven't seen the full report. I haven't read the full report yet. But the finding seems basically accurate. This was information that could have endangered the lives of American service people because he was putting out real-time information about upcoming bombing runs.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
GOLDBERG: Upcoming is the important point.
INSKEEP: Absolutely. Like, anything ceases to be classified after an operation, possibly, but before an operation is the most sensitive time. Now, you mentioned...
GOLDBERG: Right.
INSKEEP: ...The inspector general. I'll give his name - Steven A Stebbins. I've been looking him up. He's been promoted across both the Trump and Biden administrations. He's been around for a while. And we should just remind people that the Trump administration fired a bunch of inspectors general early in the administration, but it appears that there are still some left who are willing to say what they think happened.
GOLDBERG: Right. Exactly. And I do find that unusual. What's not unusual is that the administration is behaving as if this was not a leak of classified information. It is true that the secretary of defense has declassification power, but to say that the information that he was sharing is not secret and was not sensitive is absurd.
INSKEEP: Well, let's get into the statement that has been made in response. Sean Parnell, Pentagon spokesperson, in responding to this news, calls it, quote, a total vindication - adds, case closed. What do you think of that?
GOLDBERG: I think they think that we're very stupid. We, the citizens of the United States. That's obviously a silly statement. There's no exoneration here. Everyone with a phone understands that it's a mistake to be providing information to group chats, even nonsensitive information to group chats that you don't know the participant - you don't know the names of the participants. But it's doubly absurd.
I think you don't have to be an expert in national security to know that if you're putting into a general chat the timing of an upcoming bombing run where American pilots are going to be over hostile territory - if you don't think that that's sensitive and should not be shared in an insecure platform, I don't know what to tell you. They obviously believe that they can kind of bull their way through this and just say, nothing to see here. Please move along. But the inspector general, like most Americans studying this, said, no, there's obviously a problem here. And you guys need to go fix your problem.
INSKEEP: And I guess we'll note that Secretary Hegseth himself has also posted on social media that he sees this as total exoneration. You called for accountability when you were on this program earlier in the year, talking about what had just happened at that point. What would accountability look like other than this report, which lays out what the inspector general feels happened?
GOLDBERG: Well, the only thing I would say on that is that if this had been a lower-ranking - lower-ranking civilians in the government or military officers of lower rank in the Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy - if they had shared information that was one-100th as sensitive as this information over a commercial messaging app, the civilians would be fired. The military officers or enlisted personnel would be court-martialed. There are rules governing the sharing of sensitive, classified, secret information, and those rules are applied to people of lower rank.
INSKEEP: It strikes me that you think that whether this material was specifically classified or not is not really relevant. It was clearly sensitive information, bottom line, and something should have happened as a result.
GOLDBERG: It was obviously classified information when Hegseth and others put it onto Signal. I mean, you cannot fool us into thinking that this was not sensitive, classified information. It is the most sensitive information the government possesses.
INSKEEP: Jeffrey Goldberg is editor in chief of The Atlantic. Glad you joined us this morning. Thanks so much.
GOLDBERG: Thank you.
INSKEEP: And as we mentioned earlier, NPR CEO Katherine Maher chairs the board of the Signal Foundation. Its subsidiary makes the Signal app. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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