How Trump's secret war plans were leaked in a group chat
The News Agents
Global
4.2 • 4.3K Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2025
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
In the days before a US bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, key members of Trumps administration began to plan the attack in a group chat. They accidentally invited a top journalist into the group - in what has become one of the all time best security fuck ups ever. Will anyone pay the price? What will Trump do now ? And do Europeans still trust America with their security?
Later, we are joined by the Adolescence writer and creator Jack Thorne - what does he want to see happen for the future of young men and boys?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.2 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:11.5 | Did you ever try to start a group text? You're adding people and you accidentally add the wrong person. |
| 0:17.0 | All of a sudden, your Aunt Mary knows all your raunchy plans for the Bachelor Party. |
| 0:21.1 | Well, that kind of happened today with the Trump administration. |
| 0:23.9 | Mike Wallace was putting together a group chat on Signal. |
| 0:26.5 | Yeah, all so utterly trivial. |
| 0:28.9 | It's just like going for a Bachelor Party, except that the 16 most senior people in national security in the US, oops, added by mistake, the editor-in-chief |
| 0:42.5 | of a magazine critical of Donald Trump and who knows about national security. And they revealed |
| 0:49.9 | their war plans two hours before they started bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen. |
| 0:56.4 | Yeah. Today we're going to tell you the story of the Houthi PC small group, |
| 1:02.2 | Signal group chat and how Geoffrey Goldberg found himself centre stage of something |
| 1:09.1 | he should never, ever have been a part of. Welcome to the news |
| 1:13.9 | agents. The news agents. It's John. It's Emily. And I try to ration my use of bad language on |
| 1:22.6 | this podcast because, well, it's just not a great look. But has there been a fuck up like this one where the |
| 1:29.4 | National Security Advisor adds, by mistake, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Magazine to a chat |
| 1:37.7 | group about something that is totally confidential, highly secret, could compromise agents in the field with the war |
| 1:47.5 | plans of what the US is going to do in Yemen. I honestly find it difficult to think of anything |
| 1:55.1 | that comes close in the scale of utter crass stupidity as what has just unfolded. |
| 2:03.3 | Yeah, this is the story that broke early yesterday evening UK time. |
| 2:07.6 | And it broke when the journalist at the centre of this, Geoffrey Goldberg, who writes for the Atlantic, |
| 2:13.7 | posted a piece in which he says, |
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