Hi, I’m Josh Sanburn, producer with More To The Story. I remember reading the headlines and thinking, “This was written by The Onion. This can’t be real.” 

“The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” That was The Atlantic’s headline, and the story was written by Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, who’d been inadvertently added to an internal Signal chat back in March about imminent military strikes against Houthi forces in Yemen. After getting personally attacked by White House officials, he published the chats in The Atlantic. And for Jeffrey, they showed a White House—and especially a secretary of defense in Pete Hegseth—that seemed more interested in cosplaying as a national security team than actually being one. “In the middle of that swirl, I didn’t really contemplate just how amazingly stupid the whole thing was,” Jeffrey tells host Al Letson on this week’s episode of More To The Story.

Many of those same White House officials headed up recent military operations against Iran and its nuclear facilities. Which is exactly why we wanted to bring Jeffrey on to the show. He’s seen how this White House and its national security team operates up close, and we wanted to know what he thought of an administration that is taking such serious action in the Middle East while mismanaging war plans in the past. It was an illuminating—and sometimes darkly funny—conversation. I hope you check it out.