The Daily - Trump 2.0: Group Chats and a New Spat

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

What does the continuing fallout from the Signal text security breach tell us about President Trump’s cabinet’s approach to blame and accountability?The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Eric Schmitt, Julian E. Barnes and Maggie Haberman sit down to make sense of the latest week.Guest: Eric Schmitt, a national security correspondent for The New York Times based in Washington.Julian E. Barnes, a reporter covering the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The New York Times.Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Analysis: President Trump takes government secrecy seriously. But only when it suits him.Intelligence officials faced a fresh round of questions about the Signal leak.A disregard for the rules trickles down from Mr. Trump to his aides.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Today, the ongoing fallout from the signal text security breach and what the first real crisis of President Trump's second term is telling us about his Cabinet's approach to blame and accountability. I spoke with three of my colleagues, national security reporter Eric Schmidt, intelligence reporter Julian Barnes, and White House correspondent Maggie Haberman. It's Friday, March 28th. Are you all situated in that tiny little adorable studio?

We are. We are. Yep. Okay, well get comfortable because you're really close to each other and I appreciate it. And we're going to be here for a while. And we're going to be here for a while. And you're going to be here for a little while. So friends, welcome back to the roundtable.

Maggie, thank you for being here. Michael, thank you. Eric, welcome to this format of the show. I think your first time doing it. Thank you, Michael. And Julian, this is your second day in a row on the show, so thank you for your endurance. Good to be with you again. So you're all in DC.

I'm in New York. It is just a timestamp, this conversation in case anything changes. 11 30 AM on Thursday, the story that we are going to be spending the entire conversation focused on is what I think of as really the first major blow up, blunder, perhaps even scandal of Trump's second term, which is the signal text messaging security breach in which Jeffrey Goldberg, who was a guest on the show earlier this week, editor of the Atlantic Magazine, became the recipient of this days long series of text messages in which the most senior officials in the White House discussed plans for an attack on Houthi Terrace in Yemen.

And what we know through multiple days of disclosures from Jeff Goldberg and the Atlantic is that those texts were very detailed, down to the type of aircraft to be used, precise timing of attacks. And that's really where I want to start. Settle for us if you can, was this information in these texts classified or not? Eric, what are you saying? Well, P-TECH Seth basically says no, it was not classified,

but we have talked to several senior military officials and pilots who have flown these missions who say it certainly had to have been classified when it was shared. Whether it was declassified perhaps after the fact is possible, but we don't know that. And why do they say it has to be classified? Can you just explain that?

It was sent just two hours or so before the first strikes were to take place against the Houthis on March 15th. And you don't want this information getting out ahead of any attack because it puts, in this case, US pilots at risk. And so almost by definition, officials are telling us this had to be classified at the time. Julian, do you concur with that? Absolutely. I mean, there are ways to talk around classified information. You can be generalized.

You can take out specifics. But that's not what happens with the details of the strike. Like when you say this kind of plane is taking off at this hour, that is highly classified for a reason. The reason being is if it fell in enemy hands, it could be actionable. So that's why that kind of information, troop movement information prior to it being executed is always among the most classified information that the US possesses. Right.

And I just want to give an example of some of the language in the text messages that were sent by Pete Hexeth, the defense secretary. This is a quote. 1410, more F-18s launch, parentheses, second strike package. 1415, so five minutes later, strike drones on targets. So it's really specific. Maggie, do you have a sense of, given what Eric and Julian just said, why senior officials from the Trump administration who were on these text chains are so definitively denying

that anything in those messages were classified. I mean, two of them, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Radcliffe, happened to be testifying before Congress this weekend. Of course, they're asked about this. And repeatedly, they say none of this is classified. So are they applying some kind of a legal definition that perhaps lies outside of what our colleagues are describing? Is this a political explanation?

Are they just kind of daring the political system to hold them accountable for what might not be a true statement? How do you think about that? The answer is yes to all three questions. Look, I didn't watch all of the hours of testimony that Tulsi Gabbard and John Radcliffe gave, so I can't speak to the expanse of everything they said. But as I understand it, as I've read, as some of what you've described, they are adhering to this line that it was not classified. That is extremely hard to fathom.

We don't know more than we know, but it's for all the reasons Eric and Julian said, it's hard to believe that. So I think that this is a line that is coming down from the White House, which is that they are going to insist this was not classified information and try to plow through and Wait for the story to pass and wait for the storm to pass Trump himself seemed to be moving a bit away from that on Wednesday when he said, you know, maybe it was classified who knows but they have Come to see and have leaned into the idea that there is Nothing other than the courts that could hold them accountable, and they clearly are challenging that right now too.

So they are the law. They control the Justice Department. Right. They control the FBI. Well, let's talk a bit more about what you just mentioned, that President Trump is introducing some very notable ambiguity into this classification question. He was in the Oval Office. I just want to play what he said and have you all process it.

Do you still believe nothing classified was shared? — Well, that's what I've heard. I don't know. I'm not sure. You have to ask the various people involved. I really don't know. — That does not sound to my ears like somebody backing up the claims of two very important deputies before Congress, right? — It's impossible to say whether Trump actually knows it is classified, whether he's been told that it may have been classified at one point, or whether he's just to say whether Trump actually knows that it's classified, whether he's been told that it may have been classified at one point, or whether he's just trying to move

on from the question. You're talking about somebody who likes to act surprised when he hears something, even if he knew it already in public. What he wants to do is move on from this as fast as possible and not get tangled up in a question from a reporter. Got it. Of course, at the heart of this classification debate is the question of just how dangerous the information in these texts really is to soldiers.

And we've started to think about that in this conversation, but I wanna get into real detail about it because it seems so important. And I wonder if we can even imagine, Eric or Julian, because you've covered this really closely over the past few days, the scenarios in which this information becomes a danger to U S soldiers who were about to carry out this attack in Yemen.

I feel like it would really help listeners if we could get specific about the idea of how this might be dangerous. Okay. So let me give you one example. Two hours before this attack takes place. Pete Hagseth alerts this group that this is going to happen. The first group of F-18 Super Hornets off the

aircraft carrier, Harry S. Truman, which is in the Red Sea. These are about to take off. He's basically saying to anybody who might get a hold of this information, you have two hours to adjust your defenses on the ground if you're the Houthis. And so this gives them advance warning to prepare to go after these planes

in a much more aggressive way than they might be able to. Even though the techs don't specify targets and precise locations of where US planes are gonna be. But they have the launch times and they know in general where US planes are going to be. But they have the launch times, and they know in general where the planes and drones are launching from. And that's all they would need to know to position their air defenses to be ready. Now, there's no evidence that the Houthis can penetrate phones. They don't have that technology as far as we know.

But we know the Chinese have broadly hacked American mobile networks. That's one reason everybody moved to Signal. We do know if a nation state hacks your phone, your Signal would not be as secure if your phone had not been hacked. So the danger you're suggesting is perhaps China had been already living inside the phone of one of the 20 participants on this text thread. Well, JD Vance was among the targets of the China hack. So for starters. They got JD Vance's phone, right?

They were on it. They were listening to JD Vance's conversations. And the other data point is the Russians have provided intelligence to the Houthis before. It's not a theoretical problem. Now, it hasn't been a massive amount, but it's been enough that the Biden administration was worried about this. It is a pathway where the Russians, in order to tweak the United States, have given Houthis information that they can act on. Right. So you're saying the Houthis in Yemen are essentially a few degrees removed, potentially,

from being able to obtain what was being said in this text thread, in theory, and there's no indication that that happened, but that's why the specificity of, you know, the F-18s and the launch times matter, because their defense systems could then be kicked into higher gear. Correct. And the Houthis aren't just a ragtag bunch of terrorists out there. They have acquired sophisticated air defense systems. They have shot at American ships with missiles. They have taken down a Reaper drone,

which is a heavily armed attack drone. Hegseth tells the chat exactly when the Reaper drones are going to take off. If you had that, you would know when to put your people in position, when to arm your air defense systems to take down that drone. Now the loss of a drone isn't that bad, but if they knew when a F-18 was going to come at them, they could be ready for that too.

And that would have far greater consequences if an American pilot was shot down over Yemen. Aaron Powell Erick, you've spent some time talking to rank-and-file service members in the military about their reaction to all of this, the use of this platform, the level of detail, the danger it may have posed to those carrying out the attack. What are they telling you? Well, they're telling us they're angry, they're disappointed, because in a lot of ways, Pete Hexeth has come in and said, I'm one of you guys.

I'm not one of the brass. I'm not one of these retired generals or retired lawmakers. I'm a rank and file guy. If he wants to be one of the troops, you know, I think he wanted to be able to, you know, show off a little bit of what the military was doing by demonstrating the detailed strikes that were coming.

But I think people are just shocked that he would be talking about this on a commercial messaging app. And if they had been caught doing this, they would have been brought up on charges and maybe court-martialed. This is how serious this kind of an issue is. Mm-hmm. So in short, it sounds like all these folks are saying that this is not consistent with

the version of Pete Hegseth that Pete Hegseth has presented in this short time that he's been running the US military. That's right. They're saying it's reckless, it's cavalier, and it's careless. All things that can get people killed in combat. Okay. Well, when we come back, we're going to discuss the question of who is really at fault here for the existence and the information conveyed on this text thread

and the White House campaign so far to resist accountability. So we'll be right back. Maggie, you mentioned that President Trump seems to be backing away from the certitude of those around him that nothing was classified in these chats. But I'm also wondering, just based on your reporting, how mad or not is Trump about the very existence of this crisis? Just to step back for a second, Michael, on what Donald Trump understands about messaging apps and how these things work.

He only started using text messages about two and a half years ago. He called sending texts send a wire to someone for a very long time. I don't think he has any understanding of what signal was until now. So his first two questions were whether the mission was compromised, and the answer was no, clearly. But his other question was, why was Jeffrey Goldberg in there? And that gets to a bigger issue for Donald Trump, which really is not about the fact that there was sensitive attack planning discussions happening on a commercial messaging app, it was why was someone in contact with this particular journalist who Donald Trump really doesn't like.

Right. And just to explain, he does not like Jeffrey Goldberg for a number of reasons, including the fact that Jeff Goldberg broke the story, which the Trump White House has denied, that in the first term, Trump called U.S. soldiers who had been killed suckers and losers, which was, of course, extremely offensive to the veteran community. But Maggie, I want to zero in, and Julian, Eric as well, on what you just said about what the president is most focused on,

not the fact that traditional security protocols seem to have been flouted here with text messages that were on a commercial app rather than formal government channels, but the fact that a journalist was on the text. And if that's what he's focused on, then who does he blame for that? He blames Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, because he's the one who set up the group chat. And his main question for AIDS has been, after condemning this as stupid, has been, does Mike Walz talk to Jeffrey Goldberg?

Trump is consumed with paranoia about leaks. And the idea that Jeff Goldberg's number would be in Mike Walz's phone has been a preoccupying fact. I have noticed, and I wonder, Eric, if you've noticed this as well, that as Maggie's getting at, the president has decided to shift this story away from Pete Hegseth.

I mean, a couple nights ago, he was in the Oval Office and said something along the lines of, how is this about Hegseth? How do you get to Hegseth. I mean, a couple nights ago, he was in the Oval Office and said something along the lines of, how is this about Hegseth? How do you get to Hegseth? And kind of left unsaid was, this is a Mike Waltz story. This is a story about my national security advisor. And I wonder if you think that's as much about suspicion

of Waltz and caring about Jeff Goldberg being on the thread? Or is it about him just genuinely wanting to shield Pete Hegseth? It's probably a little bit of both. He likes Pete Hegseth. Just earlier last week, he had an Oval Office ceremony to announce a new fighter jet named the P-47, 47 being President Trump. But Pete Hegseth was right at his side cheering him on. And so I think what Hegseth brings is a

tremendous amplifier of president Trump's priorities. And that's when you talk to Hegseth and any time he makes public remarks, he comes back to the things that president Trump is doing. He's rooting out diversity issues in the military. He's sending troops to the southwest border

where they are now. He is going to beef up the military and restore its lethality. Those are the themes that keeps coming back. And I think Trump enjoys that and wants to let his secretary survive in this crisis. Just to add to that, Michael, Trump has a long relationship with Pete Hegseth.

Trump wanted to pick Pete Hegseth for his cabinet in a different role in the first term. It didn't work out for a variety of reasons. He doesn't really have a deep relationship with Mike Waltz, and that's important to bear in mind here. Can we talk for a minute about how Mike Waltz has decided to handle this moment? Increasingly, as the president has shifted the focus to him, you created the text thread. Why on earth is Jeffrey Goldberg on your phone in the first place? Waltz has kind of been in the hot seat.

And he went on Fox News a few nights ago and inevitably was asked the question, how does Jeffrey Goldberg end up in this text thread by Laura Ingraham? And I wanna play this for you. And the clip begins just after waltz has claimed I don't really know Jeff Goldberg. I've never really spoken to him, but you've never talked to him before So how's the number on your phone? I mean, I'm not an expert in any of this

But it's just curious how's the number on your phone? Well, if you have somebody else's contact and then it and then somehow someone's not sent you that it gets sucked in Was there someone else the claim here is that somehow Jeff Goldberg's number got sucked? The claim here is that somehow Jeff Goldberg's number got sucked into his phone and then into his signal. I have signal on my phone. I'm sure all of you do. And that's not my understanding of how this works. Signal essentially is a reflection of the contacts in the rest of your phone.

And it's hard to imagine a phone just sucking up a prominent journalist phone number from the ether, right? So what do we make of that explanation? I think there was some story that was being told, it's not clear to me if it was by Waltz or by someone around Waltz, that he had been trying to add an aide, one of his own aides, and for whatever reason, Jeffrey Goldberg's number was under his aide's contact. Now I've had people's numbers under the wrong name in my phone before,

but not somebody I work with closely. And so that seemed to be what he was talking about with the sucked in. To say that that story has not been given a lot of credence within the White House would be an understatement. Right. And it's easy to make a mistake in this app potentially, like you said, which is why senior government officials,

especially those who traffic and really confidential information, aren't supposed to communicate on an app like this. And yet, the White House and everyone around the president are still hyper-focused on the mistake of a journalist being added to the chat, not the chat being the place where the conversation was happening. I want to go back to just waltz for a second because it does seem like the bat signal has gone out from the White House that waltz is the problem here.

And once that message has gone out, you see it reflected and amplified in the world of conservative media. Are we approaching the moment where that world has decided that Waltz needs to go and is that a possibility? Yes and yes. As you correctly observed, there is an ecosystem that exists now that goes into effect that gives certain people antibodies

and attacks a different organism. And so in this case- Hegseth has the antibodies. Hegseth and JD Vance and others on that chat. Mike Waltz does not. And so Trump has been very reluctant to fire people this term. I say this term as if we're two years in, we're 60 days in or so. But he really regretted firing Mike Flynn, his first national security advisor, after

he did in his first term. Flynn only lasted a handful of weeks. He has tried to avoid doing that so far. This is described to me by a number of people in and outside of close to the White House as an unsustainable situation. So when things change remains to be seen, but there has been a steady drip, drip, drip. And Trump, as a number of people close to him have said to me, is never going to look at Mike Waltz the same way again. And once that happens, it's very hard to come back from. Obviously, anything is possible.

But most people in the administration do not think that Mike Waltz is going to be able to continue on for a very long time. Let's talk about this broader question of accountability here. Is there any possibility of an investigation into what happened here or are we quite certain that that's just never going to happen for the reasons I think we talked about at the very beginning, which is that this administration is staffed with loyalists who have virtually

no incentive to open an investigation that might lead somewhere bad, perhaps to one of the people with the antibodies, Maggie, like you just said. Well, there's a small possibility here. I mean, Roger Wicker, the senator from Mississippi who leads the Armed Services Committee, he's been very critical repeatedly of Pete Hegseth. So he's been one of the few Republicans who has been unafraid to speak publicly. And he's raised the possibility that the Senate Armed Services Committee will look into this. Now, will this be a investigation

with real teeth? Will they back down when the White House pressures them to stop? Maybe. So there's no guarantees, but there's at least a possibility. Yeah, but it's a narrow one because the attorney general signaled Thursday morning that where people really ought to be focusing their attention on is Joe Biden and on Hillary Clinton. And this is not going to be a focus for the Department of Justice. I mean, there are going to be people in Trump's orbit and his supporters who say this approach

overall, don't investigate, don't feel like you have to apologize for any of this, makes complete sense. Because in their minds, this is being totally blown out of proportion by Democrats and by the news media. But I have to imagine a lot of the public, especially the moderate political public, is wondering why not just issue some kind of mea culpa here? Just acknowledge it's not a great idea to have had this conversation on text. And say so. Say we learned a valuable lesson

The stakes here were actually high and we're not going to do this again Is there anyone in the White House who's advising the president and those around him? to think about that to look beyond their anger at Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic for getting these texts and publishing them and Imagine that there is a group of voters in this country who just want this administration to hold itself accountable. The closest that we've heard anyone come to that, Michael, is the Secretary of State, who said that somebody made a mistake. That, I think, is going to be the extent of what you hear,

even if somebody else echoes that line from the White House. The thing Donald Trump hates more than Jeffrey Goldberg is apologizing. And so it's not really something you hear him do too often, especially without blaming someone else in the process. It's just not what they do. Every time he is facing a controversy, he doubles down on his original position. And that is what you're seeing here, and he tries to sustain that as long as he can. Now, I don't know how much longer he can sustain what he is doing.

I think that's part of what we're talking about here. But it's just not in their DNA. And even if Mike Walz does not survive this, you are not really going to hear the administration say, we are so sorry. You heard some version of this was a mistake and it won't happen again. That in and of itself is surprising for this White House. You could argue, though, that this is already starting to backfire. We're starting now to see conservatives, prominent ones, not just go after Mike Walz, but pretty

much say to the president, this doesn't seem like the wise approach. So I want to play what Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports had to say. He's someone who we generally associate with the Trump backing Manosphere. He endorsed Trump in this last election. This is what he had to say about the way that the president and the administration have handled this whole thing so far. I don't care if you're right, left. There's nothing being made up here. Jeffrey Goldberg is telling the truth. It's obvious these texts are real. It's obvious they're classified. We are lucky it didn't cause the death of American, uh, military members. Somebody has to go down for this.

This is a mistake. Julian, what did you think of that? I was struck this week that it was the first time in the beginning of this second Trump term that he didn't seem in control of the news cycle. And in fact, their initial taunts toward the Atlantic just got the Atlantic to release even more, which kept the cycle going. And we had two congressional hearings that were dominated by it. And so this has been a very interesting moment.

I don't know how long it will last. Mm-hmm. Eric, it feels like the real risk for Trump here is not going to be news cycles or, you know, necessarily the entire conservative movement turning on him, although there's a possibility of that happening over time. It's that this current strategy of deny, dodge, redirect persists, and that the military, active and veteran, sees in this incident, like you said, an administration being careless with the lives of soldiers, on top of all the things that this administration has already done to the military and to veterans, made

significant cuts, made it harder for veterans to get quick care at the VA. And this is a group of Americans who, by and large, support this president. And it seems like a strange group to risk alienating. Absolutely. And this veterans community is, in many regards, outraged by this. Not just by what we've talked about before about disclosure of secret information, the risk it puts, but it just, it also goes to the very concept of competence. Is this administration competent? Is this defense secretary competent? And one of the,

the military operations that of course the Trump administration is focused on the most is the fiasco of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and how that went so badly. And so here comes Pete Hegseth, here comes President Trump saying we're going to change all that. And we're going to get back to the basics of what this military does so well, lethal combat operations. And I think once you start undermining this, I think it's very clear to the active duty military of what's going on here. This would never be tolerated in a normal situation. And for the veterans community, for the reasons you've just articulated,

I think too it's raised some real questions about their support for this president at this moment. Mm-hmm. But of course, Maggie, if the president succeeds in making this about Jeffrey Goldberg and sensationalistic, in their words, left-wing media storytelling, then redirection might ultimately make this not about the military, not about the idea that the wrong platform was used for a very dangerous conversation.

So that's potentially going to be a successful strategy. I think that will be a successful strategy from people who are already predisposed to believe that this president is right at all times. This story has penetrated the public consciousness in a way that no other story has in this administration so far. And it is going to leave questions for people about sloppiness and about recklessness and about truthfulness. And all of those can have longer-term effects even if this one, this controversy disappears relatively quickly.

-♪ MUSIC PLAYING Well, Maggie and Julian and Eric, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. On Thursday afternoon, a federal judge ordered several Trump administration officials, including Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth, to preserve all of the messages they exchanged over Signal in the days leading up to the attack on the Houthis. The order came in response to a lawsuit filed this week by a watchdog group that accused the officials of violating federal records laws by using Signal to plan the attack. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the White House said it would lay off 10,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees medical care, food and drugs. Over the past four years during the Biden administration, HHS's budget increased by 38 percent and its staffing increased by 17 percent. But all that money has failed to improve the health of Americans. In a video, the department's leader, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said that the agency's spending had ballooned, but that its effectiveness had diminished, and that it was time for a

major change. I want to promise you now that we're going to do more with less. No American is going to be left behind. And in a surprise move, President Trump has asked his choice to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Republican Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, to return to Congress rather than join his cabinet. The decision was motivated by simple congressional math. Republicans hold the House by an extremely slim margin

that could complicate Trump's plans to pass major legislation, including tax cuts. As a result, Trump now believes that Stefanik is more valuable to him in the House than at the United Nations. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Alex Stern, and Shannon Lin. It was edited by Paige Cowitt and Lexi Diao, and contains original music from Marian Lozano and Dan Powell, and contains original music from Marian Lozano and Dan Powell. And was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Runberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you on Monday.