U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser says he’s taking “full responsibility” for an “embarrassing” situation created when a prominent magazine journalist was added to a group chat in which pending strike plans against Houthi targets were being discussed by senior U.S. officials.
“We made a mistake. We’re moving forward,” Mike Waltz said during an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News Tuesday evening.
Waltz said he built the group chat on the Signal messenger app and that no aide was to blame.
The news broke Monday and raised many questions about how such a situation would be possible in the first place, and why Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, would have been added to the text chat.
Government officials have used Signal for organizational correspondence, but it is not classified and can be hacked. Privacy and tech experts say the popular end-to-end encrypted messaging and voice call app is more secure than conventional texting.
Waltz denies knowing journalist
During the same Fox News interview, Waltz also seemed to blame Goldberg — who was invited to join the Signal group chat, in which the war plans were being discussed — for “somehow [getting] on somebody’s contact and then gets sucked into this group.”
Waltz denied knowing Goldberg, who he separately criticized for his prior work as a journalist.
The adviser also tried to steer attention to the Trump administration’s broader goals in Washington.
U.S. President Donald Trump claims there was no classified information in a group chat that included a reporter. Former CNN Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr joins Ian Hanomansing to discuss the implications of this leak.
“Do we care about the mainstream media? Do we care about The Atlantic?” Waltz asked.
“What I care about is staying focused on mission, accomplishing the president’s agenda,” said Waltz, who also heaped praise on Trump and the team surrounding him in the White House.
Waltz ‘has learned a lesson’: Trump
Trump on Tuesday downplayed the incident, saying it was “the only glitch in two months” of his administration as Democratic lawmakers criticised the administration for handling highly sensitive information carelessly.
Trump told NBC News that the lapse “turned out not to be a serious one,” and expressed his continued support for Waltz.
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump told the network.
He also appeared to blame an unnamed Waltz aide for Goldberg being added to the group chat. “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”
Democratic senators voiced skepticism after security officials with the Trump administration testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that no classified material was shared in a group chat on Signal that inadvertently included a magazine journalist.
Barbara Starr, a former Pentagon correspondent for CNN, said the Signal scandal raised questions about whether other such incidents have occurred beyond the one reported by The Atlantic.
“We don’t know what else has gone on, what else has happened,” she told CBC News on Tuesday evening.
“Have there been other instances of this? It’s unlikely this was the first time they all decided to get on Signal together.”
