Trump Defends National Security Adviser Waltz After Signal Leak

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The president also appeared to confirm the adviserโ€™s staffer added The Atlanticโ€™s Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended national security adviser Mike Waltz after The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal chat with other high-level administration officials.

Trump said he still backs Waltz, a former Republican congressman, as some House Democrats suggested that administration officials be fired over the incident.

In response to questions about Waltzโ€™s status inside the White House, Trump told NBC News in a phone interview on Tuesday that โ€œMichael Waltz has learned a lesson, and heโ€™s a good man,โ€ adding that Goldbergโ€™s presence in the chat had โ€œno impact at all.โ€

When asked how Goldberg was added to the chat, Trump said, โ€œIt was one of Michaelโ€™s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.โ€

Trump also said he is confident in his staff and team, saying that Goldbergโ€™s addition to the chat was โ€œthe only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.โ€

Some Democrats, however, suggested that administration officials should be punished or fired.

โ€œWe canโ€™t chalk this up to a simple mistakeโ€”people should be fired for this,โ€ Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) told Axios.

โ€œThis is an outrageous national security breach and heads should roll. We need a full investigation and hearing into this on the House Armed Services Committee, ASAP,โ€ Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) wrote in a post on social media platform X, among many similar messages about the incident posted by Democrats.

Top House Democrats on the House Armed Services, Intelligence, Foreign Affairs, and Oversight committees sent a letter on Monday to Trump administration officials. They wrote, โ€œWe are deeply troubled by the report in The Atlantic that you and other Trump Administration officialsโ€ spoke about military actions against the Houthis via Signal.

In an article published on Monday, Goldberg alleged that the Signal chatโ€”which also included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubioโ€”contained plans to strike the Houthis, a Yemen-based terrorist group that has been conducting attacks in the Red Sea for months.

Goldberg told MSNBC on Monday that the exchange in the chat allegedly contained a โ€œminute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happenโ€ shared by Hegseth in Yemen.

โ€œThis is their plan, and he was taking their plan and sharing it with a bunch of civilian leaders,โ€ he said.

But Hegseth, speaking to reporters on Monday in Hawaii, panned Goldbergโ€™s assertions and said that โ€œnobody was texting war plans.โ€ He also criticized Goldberg over previous reporting heโ€™s done.

Byย Jack Phillips

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