Imagine you’re a senior manager for a company. You and other members of your corporate braintrust, working in different locations, hop on a group text to discuss strategic plans relating to your chief competitor, but you mistakenly add to the group a business reporter with whom you’ve spoken in the past. That reporter then blows the cover on your company’s secret planning in a widely read exposé.

Do you keep your job after this inadvertent yet brutal mistake? We all know the answer to that.

The country just saw a similar scenario play out in a far higher-stakes setting, with the accidental inclusion of the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in a discussion over messaging app Signal between many of President Donald Trump’s top administration officials. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg said he was privy to information on an impending attack on Houthi insurgents in Yemen, including timing, specific targets including individuals, weapons systems being deployed, sequencing of planned events and even the identity of a heretofore-unknown CIA operative who was to be CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s liaison for the operation.

For his part, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded, “Nobody was texting war plans.” Goldberg’s description of what was discussed amounts to what any reasonable person would conclude were “war plans,” so one of these men isn’t telling the truth. The Senate Intelligence Committee has the means to find out — and should.

The U.S. attacks that began March 15 on the Iran-backed Houthis, who repeatedly have fired at American and other nations’ ships in the Red Sea, weren’t derailed by the breach, Trump said Tuesday. He described the inclusion of Goldberg on the Signal chat, which the White House confirmed, as a “glitch.” The president said national security adviser Mike Waltz, who apparently was the one to mistakenly loop in Goldberg, was “a good man” who had “learned a lesson.”

What lesson is that? Not to use a commercial app — vulnerable to interception from any sophisticated adversary that can hack a private phone — for highly sensitive if not classified discussions involving national security and warfare? To limit the number of officials needing to participate in such a virtual meeting to those really needing to know? (Why exactly did the treasury secretary need to be briefed ahead of time on this matter?)

Trump didn’t say. He did say later Tuesday that he’d asked Waltz to probe whether anyone can “break into” the Signal app.

The president’s response wasn’t sufficient. The Trump administration is simply lucky that the outsider made privy to these secrets was someone as responsible as Goldberg. To his credit, Goldberg waited until well after the military exercise began to inform the public of this breach, and he’s been careful to betray no individuals or secrets even as he’s done his duty as an American to alert the public to how this administration is conducting such critical business.

For Goldberg’s troubles, Trump officials like Hegseth responded by vilifying him and disparaging him as a journalist. Other Trump administration officials, like Ratcliffe, have denied that the breach was even a serious mistake.

The administration’s defensive crouch bordering on hostility won’t make this story go away, nor should it. Trump 2.0 isn’t the first time a presidency, Democratic or Republican, has confronted such an embarrassing revelation. There’s a way to handle such messes: Take accountability and outline steps to prevent any recurrence.

This was a dangerous error, and there should be serious repercussions. In addition, the public must be assured these sorts of internal deliberations will in the future occur only in a secure setting.

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