Release the 'Houthi PC Small Group' Thread -- Benjamin Wittes - Lawfare

[erronis]

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-situation--release-the--houthi-pc-small-group--thread

The Atlantic can’t be more Catholic than the Pope on classified material.

Today, we’re talking “Houthi PC Small Group.” And specifically, I am calling on the Atlantic magazine to do something reckless and irresponsible: Release highly sensitive war plans.

As you undoubtedly know by now, the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal group in which senior government officials were planning a military operation in Yemen. Signal is a commercial service not appropriate for classified communications. It’s a wild story, and I’m not going to rehash the whole thing here. The story got even wilder this morning when several people on the thread gave congressional testimony that simply can’t be reconciled with what Goldberg wrote.

Let me make clear that I am not criticizing the Atlantic, or Goldberg, here. The magazine has behaved in an exemplary fashion over the past several days. As Goldberg describes in the piece, he removed himself from the group after it became clear that the group was real and was exchanging highly sensitive material—including information about targeting, weapons, timing of specific attacks against the Houthis, and the name of at least one intelligence officer whose identity is protected. The magazine also withheld such details in Goldberg’s story. (Full disclosure: I was informally interviewed for the story by national security reporter Shane Harris on legal matters, though I was not privy to the story’s details until it was published.)

And what has the administration done in response to the story? First, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth maligned Goldberg, branded him a hoaxer, and declared that “nobody was texting war plans.” Then, the White House declared that “No classified material was sent to this thread.” And today, in testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, both Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe—the director of national intelligence and the CIA director, respectively, and both members of the Signal group—insisted repeatedly that no classified material had been shared. (Both later hedged and adopted the fallback position that no classified intelligence information had been shared on the thread but that only Hegseth could speak for military equities.) In other words, the entire national security establishment that Goldberg and the Atlantic had taken pains to protect took the position that there was nothing wrong with sharing this material on Signal—though obviously, it was a mistake to have included Goldberg on the Signal thread. And they took the position that there was nothing wrong with sharing the highly sensitive information distributed on this channel with uncleared persons by non-secure means.

Let me be clear: I believe Goldberg. And I believe Harris, who participated in the reporting underlying the story and whom I interviewed at length about the matter after the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing today.

And I thus believe that the administration officials are all lying.

. . .