Inside "The Signal Nine": Secret US Security Talks Excluded President Trump
Top officials used Signal app for covert Yemen discussion—without Trump, but with a journalist
If I had approached Netflix with a pitch for a series in which all but one of the most important people in the US administration met to discuss international security, using a public app and added a journalist, I would have been laughed out of the building.
Yet, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic revealed this yesterday in a stunning piece of journalism. This could be his Woodward-Bernstein moment.
You know the story by now, yet there is one part that is something of a mystery.
According to the media reports, nine top US officials, whom I am dubbing the “Signal-Nine”, and one journalist were in a private Signal app group discussing an upcoming US attack in Yemen.
The journalist took no part in the discussion, but the others, had they been following the trail of words on their screens, would have known he had been added, apparently, by national security advisor Michael Waltz.
The CNN graphic shows the nine officials, including Vice President J.D. Vance and The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg.
However, one high-ranking official is missing - one Donald Trump, president of the United States.
This begs several questions. The first is why the group existed in the first place.
Discussions of such a sensitive nature are not held on publicly available apps, using closed groups, and certainly not using a not-for-profit app called Signal. Signal is not an approved secure location for debating national security and never will be.
Secondly, how was a journalist invited to such a secret meeting in the first place? What was the motive of the person who allegedly invited him, the national security advisor, Michael Waltz? A journalist who watched in some disbelief the discussions of the Signal-Nine unfold in real time.
Thirdly, President Trump has denied knowing of the Signal groups’ existence, saying, “I don’t know anything about it.” While we are all used to Trump’s propensity to lie, what if he didn’t know? What if he was intentionally excluded? And if so, why?
The why is almost certainly because the other nine don’t trust the man at the top. This could be understandable given the president’s history of not maintaining secrecy. The Signal-Nine doesn’t trust their boss.
Was this why they held their discussion in the secret Signal group rather than in the approved secure locations and using the communication infrastructure set up for this exact purpose?
Here’s why:
Using the official channels leaves a paper trail, which is required under US law. All such discussions are recorded, and although they may remain highly classified for decades, the paper trail exists.
With Signal, discussions and texts are automatically deleted after a short period of time and are no longer retrievable. No official paper trail remains. This means the only record of the discussion between the “Signal-Nine” is the screen captures taken by Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic.
There are movements to say that all of this breaches the Espionage Act in the US and that people should be prosecuted and ultimately jailed. Will that process start, or will the excluded man at the top brush it all away with some distraction and hope that the story dies? Probably.
Maybe I should write that pitch to Netflix after all.