And tonight, President Trump called the whole episode a witch hunt and said defense secretary,

Pete Hegseth, quote, had nothing to do with this.

We're joined now by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic and moderator of Washington

Week here on PBS.

Jeff, it's good to see you.

So help us understand first your decision to release the strike plans, which you were mistakenly

made privy to,

in light of the days of denials and downplaying from the administration about the content of the signal messages.

Yeah, that's a good question.

We, yesterday when the president and various other national security officials said that there was nothing

sensitive in this material and accused us of lying about the nature of the material, we began

to think maybe we should just put this out there so that the American people can see it and

make their own conclusions, draw their own conclusions.

What we did all yesterday was reach out to various agencies,

CIA, DNI, NSC, and so on, and asked them specifically, even though the president said there was

nothing to see here, we wanted to just be sure, obviously, that we were not releasing anything

that could do harm to Americans in the field.

Most agencies didn't reply, some did.

We did, in fact, the CIA did, in fact, ask us not to publish one of the texts,

and we agreed not to do it because we obviously would want to be responsible.

But, I mean, it's interesting that the CIA director says

there's nothing sensitive or classified in this, but his own agency asked us not to publish one of

...