Jeffrey Goldberg has pushed back against the string of denials that poured in after he reported in The Atlantic that Donald Trump allegedly raged at a slain U.S. soldier’s funeral bill by saying, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f---ing Mexican.”
That alleged remark was regarding 20-year-old Vanessa Guillén, the Houston-born soldier who was murdered at Fort Hood in 2020—a horrific killing that led to leadership changes at the base and policy changes across the military. Trump offered to pay for the funeral to Guillén’s family, but reportedly never did.
Goldberg’s bombshell report, which cited “contemporaneous notes” and people inside the White House meeting where Trump allegedly made the remark, has been called false by Trump’s then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the chief of staff to his secretary of defense, Kash Patel. A lawyer for the Guillén family and the soldier’s sister, Mayra Guillén, have also spoken out to assert that Trump never made such a brash comment.
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Goldberg, 59, said in a Tuesday night appearance on CNN, however, that the deniers are either uninformed or outright lying. He made clear that he stands by his reporting.
“Given what you heard from your sources, what do you make of those denials?” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Goldberg.
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief responded, “I don’t make much of them at all. The sister wasn’t in the meeting. The lawyer for the family wasn’t in the meeting.”
Goldberg noted that Patel and Meadows were present for the alleged remark, but he insinuated that they’d refuted his report to protect Trump with less than two weeks to go before Election Day.
“I have sources who are sitting in that meeting,” he said. “I have contemporaneous notes taken by participants in that meeting that described exactly what I described in the story. We’ve seen this pattern again and again and again. They deny, deny, deny, and then it comes out as true.”
Goldberg equated the senior officials’ denials to a previously damning report he penned, in which he alleged in 2020 that Trump disparaged killed-in-action troops by calling them “suckers” and “losers.” That report, which the MAGA world quickly shot down as false, was later confirmed by John Kelly, a former chief of staff to Trump.
“This is the same thing that happened with the previous iteration of this,” Goldberg said Tuesday. “So it’s not surprising that Mark Meadows is going to deny it, but the denial doesn’t hold weight. I have contemporaneous sources and contemporaneous notes from that meeting. He said it. It also tracks with everything that we know about the way [Trump] speaks.”
Without a recording of the meeting, there’s sure to be a repeated back-and-forth on whether the comment was actually made or not. For now, all the public has to go by is Goldberg’s report and the fervent denials that have emerged since its publishing.
“I was in the discussions featured in The Atlantic’s latest hit piece against President Trump,” Meadows wrote in his statement on Tuesday. “Let me say this. Any suggestion that President Trump disparaged Ms. Guillén or refused to pay for her funeral expenses is absolutely false.”
Meadows added that Trump “was nothing but kind, gracious, and wanted to make sure that the military and the U.S. government did right by Vanessa Guillén and her family.”
A statement from the Guillén family’s lawyer, Natalie Khawam, attacked Goldberg by name. She claimed that Goldberg had misrepresented their conversation in his article and that he’d printed a lie, but she stopped short of saying what exactly he’d allegedly lied about.
“After having dealt with hundreds of reporters in my legal career, this is unfortunately the first time I have to go on record and call out Jeffrey Goldberg,” Khawam posted on X. “Not only did he misrepresent our conversation but he outright LIED in HIS sensational story. More importantly, he used and exploited my clients, and Vanessa Guillén’s murder… for cheap political gain.”
Mayra Guillén’s statement on the article, posted to her account on X, accused Goldberg of politicizing her sister’s death. She also shared that the report came on the same day she voted early for Trump.
“I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics—hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members,” she wrote. “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.”
While each denial asserted that Trump never uttered the words “f---ing Mexican” while speaking about Guillén, none refuted that Trump didn’t cover funeral costs like he’d promised to do when the Guillén family visited the White House.
