President Donald Trump is standing by his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, after a news report on Monday that senior White House officials included a journalist in a detailed discussion surrounding military air strikes on the Houthis in Yemen earlier this month over Signal, a nongovernment encrypted messaging app.
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump said in a Tuesday morning interview with NBC News, after a press report Monday evening suggested that the national security adviser’s job was in serious jeopardy.
Trump told NBC that the reporter’s presence in the chat had “no impact at all” on the success of the military strikes and said that the story amounts to “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.” The White House denies that senior administration officials shared classified information or “war plans” in the chat, as the report alleges.
According to the report, the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, received a connection request on March 11 over the messaging app Signal from a username “Michael Waltz” to join a chat called “Houthi PC small group” that included usernames identified as senior White House officials. The magazine’s editor alleges that on March 15, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted in the chat “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
The White House has corroborated the veracity of the Signal chat.
“This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” National Security Counciltold the outlet. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”
The White House is dismissing the story as a nonissue. “The White House Counsel’s Office has provided guidance on a number of different platforms for President Trump’s top officials to communicate as safely and efficiently as possible,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X Tuesday morning, adding that the administration is “looking into how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread.”
Republican lawmakers in Washington have reacted to the news with varying levels of concern. Senator John Kennedy dismissed the report as an “inside baseball” story that will blow over.
“I’m sure they’ll reassess their protocol and their practices,” he told reporters Monday evening. “But I can promise you this, when moms and dads lie down to sleep at night and this isn’t on that list. Somebody made a mistake. It happens.”
Others are raising serious concerns. “Think about what we would do if Biden were president and this came out … we would raise the roof,” centrist Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters Monday evening. “It’s going to be interesting to see if anybody loses their job over this.”