Related Articles
Jon Stewart fittingly opened Monday’s episode of The Daily Show with the dumbest news of the day: That an Atlantic journalist was accidentally added to a group chat where high-ranking members of the Trump administration were discussing ostensibly classified plans to bomb Houthi militants in Yemen.
And Stewart of course had just the right words for such a staggering mistake: “Oopsie-poopsie!”
The host then went on to reminisce about the old days when journalists had to work sources and pound the pavement to get secret war documents. “Now, you just wait for the National Security Adviser to be distracted by White Lotus while he’s setting up his ‘Bomb Yemen’ group chat,” Stewart said, before miming an absentminded text while cracking, “‘Are those guys jerking each other off?!’”
Stewart then put forward an even funnier possibility: “I might be in this group chat — I don’t know. I don’t check my group chats.” And he also shared his favorite message from the exchange, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proclaimed, “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
“For those of you who don’t know,” Stewart explained, “OPSEC means ‘operational security.’ He said that in a group chat. A group chat with a journalist.”
The “Houthi PC small group” — as the chat was known — featured a shocking array of top-ranking Trump admin and intelligence officials. Along with Hegseth, there was Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliff, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz — who appears to have been the one to add Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
Goldberg admitted he wasn’t sure if the chat was real at the time. He said on March 15, he received a lengthy text from Hegseth that, as Goldberg wrote, “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” Goldberg was able to confirm the veracity of the chat when bombs started falling soon after.
