You don't have to be more Catholic than the Pope, as the saying goes. But over the past week, an accidental leak to The Atlantic has transformed journalists into bigger defenders of government secrecy than the government itself. It has created the bizarre situation of journalists asking the White House to keep them away from juicy, fresh, newsworthy information.
To recap: National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a White House group chat for planning an upcoming military campaign in Yemen. After Goldberg reported on the existence of the group chat on Monday—without revealing much about its contents—the embarrassed Trump administration downplayed how sensitive it was.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe all insisted that there was nothing "classified" in the text messages. On Wednesday morning, The Atlantic published the full transcript, with commentary complaining that this information would "typically" be classified and could have harmed U.S. troops had it "fallen into the wrong hands" before the campaign began.
