President Trump’s former defense attorney Alina Habba, who is working as a counselor to the President at the White House and has been named interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, was asked about the bombshell revelation that Signal group chat messages between U.S. national security leaders revealed U.S. military attack plans in Yemen and were inadvertently shared with Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
WATCH: President Trump’s former defense attorney Alina Habba defended the Signal group chat messages among national security leaders that were inadvertently shared with Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, calling the controversy a “distraction.” https://t.co/jXkG5IQaxt pic.twitter.com/2Mu309wbTg
— The Hill (@thehill) March 26, 2025
Habba addressed the media outside of the White House and said: “This is, in my opinion, something they’re making a big to-do about nothing.” Habba accused Goldberg of using the incident as a way of “trying to get clout.”
[Note: Goldberg launched his career as a reporter at The Washington Post. He worked in Israel as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post; served as the New York bureau chief of The Forward; was a contributing editor at New York magazine, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, and since 2007 has been with The Atlantic where he has interviewed world leaders including President Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Israel President Benjamin Netanyahu, and King Abdullah of Jordan, among others. He was also, we now know, considered prominent enough to be in the contacts of top U.S. intelligence officials.]
Habba proudly said: “I frankly have never read The Atlantic, I don’t plan to.” She added of the media coverage of the Signal chat scandal, “I think this is a distraction…We need to look at all the good things that we’re doing…The negative spinning needs to stop…It is annoying.”
Note: In September 2020, Goldberg published the article “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’” Trump responded to the article on social media by writing, “The Atlantic . . . is dying, like most magazines, so they make up a fake story in order to gain some relevance.”
Habba joins Trump and Elon Musk in a quest to kill the messenger — in this case The Atlantic — instead of examining the message. See below: