How Did Jeffrey Goldberg Get Added to the NSA's Signal Chat?

Theory: Trump’s Alias as “Jay Goldberg” Caused the Signal Breach

The recent Signal leak, in which The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly included in a high-level government group chat discussing military operations in Yemen, has been publicly chalked up to a “glitch.” But no detailed explanation has been offered by the White House, National Security Council, or any involved officials. The silence is striking.

Hypothesis: The inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg was the result of a misidentification triggered by Donald Trump using “Jay Goldberg” as his personal alias on Signal.

Background:
Jay Goldberg was Trump’s long-time personal attorney, now deceased.

Trump has a known history of using pseudonyms (e.g., "John Barron", "John Miller") to manage press and business matters.

In secure or semi-secure communications platforms like Signal, it would be typical to avoid displaying the real identity of the president for plausible deniability and operational obfuscation.

The Likely Chain of Events:
Trump’s alias in the group is set as “Jay Goldberg” (to honor or anonymize via his former lawyer).

An NSC official is instructed to add “JG” or “Jay Goldberg” to the Signal group.

Autocomplete or contact confusion leads to Jeffrey Goldberg being added instead—especially plausible if both names were in a device’s contact list or synced from a professional network like Signal’s contact discovery.

The group chat continues for days before anyone realizes the error.

Once the breach is complete, Trump minimizes the issue, and no one is fired—suggesting that responsibility lies higher than any staffer could safely challenge.

Supporting Reasoning:
The government's complete lack of a technical explanation hints that the real story involves someone too powerful to blame.

No plausible UI or contact management failure has been offered. Signal doesn't have group suggestions or autofill errors unless a user manually selects or taps a name.

Trump’s historic comfort with aliases, combined with a dead man's name (who can’t be asked about it), makes “Jay Goldberg” the perfect operational mask.