It was the moment Democrats had been breathlessly waiting for: a mistake by the Trump Team. And to be sure, it was an unforced error: somehow the editor of the far-left outlet The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was included on a chat with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and other top Trump administration security officials. They were discussing a potential attack on Houthi militants in Yemen in response to their ongoing disruption of key shipping lanes.

Goldberg could have alerted the White House right away that he had been included, but the craven attention-seeker stayed quiet as the messages went back and forth. When he finally went public, he promised that he would deliver some bombshell information proving that the officials had been talking about top-secret war plans over the encrypted app. 

Of course, they did not actually reveal any such secrets and the story has sort of faded away, much to the chagrin of the media and Democrats, who variously have called for Hegseth to be fired for some reason (even though he didn’t set up the chat), for the impeachment of some of the officials, and for the public humiliation of Mike Waltz, since it was his office that did in fact create the chain.

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It was clearly an error, but it was not the next Watergate, it was not a “constitutional crisis,” and it was not an intelligence failure of the highest order. Mostly, it was just slightly embarrassing.

But the question remains: How did Goldberg get added to the chat in the first place? The Guardian claims in an exclusive that they know, and it was a long and rather mundane process:

It was a series of events and one mistaken keystroke that caused Goldberg's inclusion:

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

Unfortunately for Waltz, he then inadvertently added Goldberg’s to his contacts—but under the wrong name.

Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.

There you have it, and it’s about what you’d expect—an unfortunate error that should be prevented from occurring in the future (obviously). To me, the most interesting thing about the report is Trump’s alleged reasoning for not firing Waltz, as so many had clamored for him to do:

Trump briefly considered firing Waltz over the episode, more angered by the fact that Waltz had the number of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic – a magazine he despises – than the fact that the military operation discussion took place on an unclassified system such as Signal.

But Trump decided against firing him in large part because he did not want the Atlantic and the news media more broadly to have the satisfaction of forcing the ouster of a top cabinet official weeks into his second term. Trump was also mollified by the findings of the internal investigation.

The Democrats and the media wanted a massive scandal that would destroy the Trump presidency. They didn’t get it.