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National security experts at Harvard expressed shock at the Trump administration’s breach of security in a March Signal group chat, criticizing their mode of communication while praising journalist Jeffrey Goldberg.

Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, was added to a group chat on the messaging platform Signal where top Trump administrative officials discussed war plans regarding U.S. military strikes in Yemen.

Joseph S. Nye Jr, former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, said a leak this severe would typically result in firings.

“If something like this happened when I was in the Pentagon during the Clinton administration, there would have been extreme discontent.” Nye said. “People would have been fired.”

Matthew Bunn, a professor of national security at HKS, similarly said that he would “probably be headed for jail” if he had unknowingly leaked “comparably sensitive information” to the press.

“Nobody should be discussing particular times of US strikes, particular weapons, targets, et cetera, over Signal,” he said.

Bunn, who also worked in the Clinton White House, noted that the leak may “have an impact on other countries’ willingness to share information with the United States.”

“Sharing sensitive information between countries is based on trust, and it’s based on trust that that information won’t be handled in an appropriate way, that trust is very easy to damage,” he said.

Nye primarily placed blame on National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for the breach.

“As I understand the public record, Waltz is to blame for carrying out this type of conversation in a non-secure manner,” Nye added. “And Hegseth is to blame for describing attack plans in an unclassified situation.”

While Nye noted that the Trump administration “has repeatedly defied normal institutional practices,” the Signal leak is “much more egregious.”

But Nye praised Goldberg’s handling of the situation. After publishing an initial article in the Atlantic, Goldberg was highly criticized by Trump administration officials — leading the magazine to publish the full conversation.

“It’s interesting that Goldberg, the writer for the Atlantic, at first, did not describe the full transcript or disclose the full transcript,” Nye said. “But when the Trump administration denied the facts that were in that transcript, he did publish it, so the media, I think, is not to blame here.”

Ben W. Reninga, a Harvard Nieman Foundation for Journalism 2025 Fellow, said Goldberg’s reporting gave a “master class in the most appropriate, careful, and responsible way to do journalism.”

“It was such a display of adherence to norms, following protocol, and doing things properly and responsibly in the face of an incident that was the opposite,” Reninga said.

He said that it makes sense that Trump administration officials who “come from the private sector” use Signal, rather than more traditional forms of governmental communication. But he added that matters of national security should be discussed more securely.

“Once it pivots to discussing the details, coordinates, and timing of something of as high national security as war plans, it becomes a much more serious breach of protocol and much more serious issue,” he said.

Beyond the breach itself, Reninga said that “a notable part of this incident has been seeing how the Trump administration chose to respond to it.”

“An apology and an effort to figure out what had gone wrong and to make some moves to correct it could have gone a long way toward lessening the impact of a breach like this,” Reninga said. “Instead, they prevaricated, doubled down, and smeared a journalist.”

Nye said that the severe backlash and criticisms of the breach should encourage the administration to tighten their communication procedures.

“They’ve paid a price in terms of political reactions. So just in terms of their narrow self-interest, they should be changing their behavior,” Nye said. “Whether they will go beyond that or not is unpredictable.”

“We can only hope that, informally, they will improve their practices — because it’s in their political self-interest,” he added.