JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

Despite the Trump administration's enthusiastic efforts to deflect attention away from Signal Gate and the extraordinary security breach it represents, they're doing this mainly by calling me unpleasant names, Senate leaders of both parties are calling for an investigation and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who first included me in the Signal Group and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are both facing calls to resign.

Joining me tonight to discuss this controversy, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Laura Barron-Lopez is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and Shane Harris covers the intelligence agencies for The Atlantic.

So, hi, nice to see all of you.

Thank you for being here.

It's a little bit of an unusual show, but we're just going to act like it's not.

Thank you for all having your phones with you.

I want to be -- I want them visible at all times.

Let's start by talking about the consequences the serious national security consequences of this issue.

And I want to start with Shane, who can probably lead us through better than almost anyone what this means for security and safety in the national security realm.

SHANE HARRIS, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Yes.

Well, first off, there's the question of how in the world did this happen that these top level officials thought it was a good idea to be planning a military operation on a commercial phone app, which is one reason I think that both of us thought in the beginning that this couldn't possibly be real.

So, there's real concerns about that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Not just in the beginning.

Like right up to the -- yes.

SHANE HARRIS: Right up to end until the kind of the moment happened.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

SHANE HARRIS: But, look, there is -- you know, not just because you know, Signal is fine as an end-to-end encrypted app, but if your phone is compromised, if there's a hacker on there, we know, by the way, that J.D.

Vance's phone has been compromised by Chinese intelligence and he was part of the Signal group or the Signal group.

So, there are huge concerns about that, putting this kind of information into a form that it can be intercepted and used.

And, look, it is painfully obvious now to everyone involved that it is quite easy to add someone to that group who shouldn't be there.

This is precisely why usually conversations like this happen in a secure facility on classified government networks so that you can't inadvertently add Jeff Goldberg, you know, to the conversation.

That's a huge issue.

And, frankly, a lot of the conversation that was happening about trying to stick Europe with the bill is going to have diplomatic repercussions.

There are insights now into divisions within the administration over the policy wisdom of attacking the Houthis, which is not going to be a one-off, and those kinds of divisions could persist.

You know, in 25 years of covering national security, I have never seen anything approximating this story.

It is just replete with security and policy risks.

And now the explanation for it is, well, there was nothing really to see here.

This was all somehow normal.

I presume there are conversations like this going on other apps, and there have been probably for some time in this administration.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Laura, were you surprised that they were using -- you covered this administration.

Were you surprised that they were using Signal to talk about really sensitive stuff?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, White House Correspondent, PBS NewsHour: Yes.

I know that Signal has become something that's used a bit more amongst government officials, although there's questions about whether it should be used, period, because of the records keeping laws that are place.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Wait, we'll go into that.

What does that mean?

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Well, just that, you know, they're supposed to be records kept of official government communications and Signal texts can disappear.

You can set it on the app to disappear as early as an hour or seconds after you send a text message on that app to a week afterwards.

And I believe in your group chat that you were involved in, it was set to about a week.

So -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A week and then, and they changed it to -- Mike Waltz changed it to four weeks.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: To four weeks.

So, that's -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Which I didn't understand.

LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: But, I mean, that's also what, it's at the heart of the lawsuit right now that they're facing, which is that they need, and they were ordered by a judge to preserve these documents.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Peter, go back to this question of -- I mean, you've been covering foreign -- both of you have been covering foreign policy issues for a long time.

Is there any controversy analogous to this, any kind of just sort of like, I guess not to put too fine a point, a dumb mistake like this?

I mean, assuming it's a dumb mistake.

PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: There are.

You're right there.

Look, there were many screw ups in Washington since time in memorial, but I can't think of one quite like this.

I mean, it's really something.

because there are multiple levels, right?

There is the decision to use Signal in the first place for something so sensitive.

And then, of course, the question of who they happen to add to it.

And, you know, congratulations on being added.

Every journalist in town hates Jeff Goldberg this week because it wasn't us.

But the truth is -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Every journalist then Mike Waltz.

PETER BAKER: And Mike Waltz, right.

But the truth is it's very unlikely this was the first time that they were using Signal.

It just happened to be the first time that added Jeff Goldberg, right?

So, it raises the questions we're talking about, like how much have they been doing this?

What kinds of conversations have they been doing?

Have they preserved the records and who else has been listening?

If they didn't add Jeff Goldberg on these previous calls, who did get at it?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I just want to say to the viewers at home, anybody who wants to add me to their sensitive Signal chat, please feel free.

Susan -- LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Or any of us.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, or any of our panel, any of our guests.

Yes, don't go -- SUSAN GLASSER, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Jeff is busy.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Don't go with the old the old hat.

The -- so I want to talk about secrecy.

Susan, why don't you start us off actually, but I obviously want to hear from everyone, including Shane, when is something secret and when it's not, and put it into the context of their response to this issue?

SUSAN GLASSER: Yes.

Well, I mean, look, anyone who's been watching Donald Trump and those surrounding him for the last eight years probably weren't surprised that their default setting was to attack the journalists, the people who brought you enemies of the people in fake news.

You know, a badge of honor for you, Jeff, that, you know, they immediately started impugning your integrity and attacking your -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Not my first rodeo, not yours and yours and -- yes.

SUSAN GLASSER: Well, you know, we've all had the pleasure at one point or the other of you know, being personally savaged by the president of the United States.

Not something any of us probably expected when we were growing up.

But to your point about their excuse, what's really interesting is that they moved, that wasn't enough, and you had the receipts, so they moved very quickly to, oh, don't believe you're lying eyes, which is another thing in the Donald Trump playbook, right, which is like that thing that you just saw, never mind the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.

Actually, it was a totally peaceful, excellent protest.

In fact, he's now talking just this week, side note, on paying reparations to those poor people who stormed our Capitol and violently attacked it.

But I think this is of a piece with that, right?

So, they immediately went to don't believe your lying eyes.

They sent the CIA director, the director of National Intelligence, up to swear under oath on Capitol Hill.

Oh, no, no classified information.

And I think that's the conversation that we're having now.

That's interesting.

All you guys have a perspective on that in Washington.

Even for them, it's pretty shameless.

I mean, Shane, like I can't remember a moment where they would say something like this.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Wait.

Shane, before you jump in, just watch Tulsi Gabbard for a second at the hearing on Tuesday.

SHANE HARRIS: Yes.

TULSIA GABBARD, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: I have not participated in any Signal group chat or any other chat on another app that contained any classified information.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, what is that?

SHANE HARRIS: This is it's absurd.

Like the line that they're pursuing that what was in that chat, and we've all seen it now, was not classified, doesn't even pass the smell test.

You can literally look at the DOD and the I.C.

regulations that are public, where they give nice descriptions of the kinds of information that is presumptively secret or top secret.

A lot of stuff in that chat matches that.

You know, information is classified based on how severe the damage would be if it were released.

So, you have secret information, top secret information.

As you go up the ladder, the classification corresponds to the damage that would do if it fell into the hands of your adversaries or to the public.

So, by saying the information is not classified or is unclassified, what these officials would have you believe is that all of this could be made public and there'd be no consequence.

We talked about this, you know, in the course of reporting this story, had that information fallen into the hands of a U.S. adversary that had been in the group, or had you been a less scrupulous journalist and tweeted it, that information would then be known to the Houthis who would be able to prepare defenses and a counter attack that absolutely would jeopardize the lives of U.S. forces.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

PETER BAKER: And you couldn't believe that you have been attacked for jeopardizing those -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, I mean, that was not, and this is a conversation that Shane and I and others at The Atlantic had.

It's like the last thing that we want to do, maybe this is controversial in some quarters.

It's not controversial with me.

The last thing we ever would want to do is put Americans in harm's way by putting out information about a tactical issue, a technical tactic.