Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, on Sunday pushed back against an earlier claim from national security adviser Mike Waltz about a group chat in which top Trump administration officials discussed an attack on Yemen.
Waltz had claimed earlier this week that Goldberg’s phone number was “sucked in” to his phone via “somebody else’s contact.”
“This isn’t ‘The Matrix,’ phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones,” Goldberg told NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.” “I don’t know what he’s talking about there.”
“You know, very frequently in journalism, the most obvious explanation is the explanation,” Goldberg added. “My phone number was in his phone, because my phone number is in his phone.”
Goldberg detailed his time in the group chat he was mistakenly added to in a report last Monday that rattled Washington and resulted in heightened fears around national security.
The White House scrambled to contain the controversy surrounding the group chat this week, with officials pouncing on a headline description of “attack plans” versus “war plans,” suggesting a small difference in wording showed controversy was too intense.
On Sunday, Goldberg said that Waltz is “telling everyone that he’s never met me or spoken to me, that’s simply not true.”
“I understand why he’s doing it,” Goldberg added.
Waltz said Tuesday in a White House meeting that he and Goldberg had “never met.”
“There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves making up lies about this president,” Waltz said. “Whether it’s the Russia hoax or making up lies about Gold Star families, and this one in particular I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with, and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room.”
