National political reporter Neil W. McCabe said he believes the journalist from The Atlantic who was mistakenly included in a group chat among top Trump administration officials is an example of “a war against the Trump administration being fought from the inside.”
On Monday, The Atlantic magazine Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg said he was invited to join the chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal and did so when it later convened about a conversation among officials about U.S. plans to launch airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
McCabe, however, said he does not believe Goldberg was invited to the chat “accidentally” and instead thinks that Goldberg’s presence in the chat was the workings of a “complete inside job.”
“There’s no way that’s true. There is no way on God’s green earth that is true…This thing was such a hack. This thing was so rigged,” McCabe said on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
McCabe also noted how Goldberg’s presence in the chat occurred just before the Trump intelligence chiefs testified before the U.S. House and U.S. Senate intel committees, which, during this week’s hearings, saw Democratic members posing specific questions to the Trump officials regarding the chat.
That congressman didn’t happen to dig that up, and the morons that work for that congressman didn’t happen to dig that up either…They were asking very specific questions, and I don’t want to say perjury trap, but what they wanted to do is they wanted to get these guys on the record saying stuff that would be contradicted by what Goldberg was holding back,” McCabe explained.
“So this is a complete inside job, and obviously we have to take some of the DOGE team and figure it out,” McCabe added.
McCabe further noted how Goldberg’s presence in the chat has given the Democrats a domination news cycle for the first time during Trump’s presidency.
“This is a war against the Trump administration being fought from the inside…This is the biggest hit that Trump has taken in a long time, and this is the first time since election day that the Democrats have dominated the news cycle,” McCabe said.
When it comes to how Goldberg was invited to join the chat, McCabe said it is possible a staffer or someone who was “in a position of trust” may have added the journalist while also noting that he said he believes Goldberg may not have been the only individual in the chat who shouldn’t have been.
“I assume, also, that Goldberg was not the only person on that call who wasn’t supposed to be on that call, because Goldberg has had trust issues. He’s had credibility issues. So if Goldberg was part of this, if this is the op, I imagine Goldberg would’ve had other people on the op ready to back up his account. I’m not sure that Jeff Goldberg at The Atlantic has the capacity to operate an op like this from his offices at The Atlantic,” McCabe said.
If Goldberg knew of a plan to include him in the chat, McCabe said he would be in violation of federal law.
“The Supreme Court has expanded the First Amendment because of the people’s right to know that if a journalist has something dropped in their lap from a stork, they have no legal jeopardy…Goldberg is in the clear if it was inadvertent, but as soon as they establish that he had contact with the inside man, then he is on the ropes,” McCabe said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Jeffrey Goldberg” by CSIS | Center for Strategic & International Studies. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
