‘It’s just something that can happen,’ Trump said.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump brushed off the idea of firing the official responsible for adding journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat in which top administration officials were discussing a sensitive military operation.
Trump instead downplayed the offense in response to a question from National Review about whether the perpetrator will be fired, saying “It’s just something that can happen.”
“We pretty much looked into it,” said Trump. “It’s pretty simple, to be honest. It’s not — it’s just something that can happen. It can happen. You can even prepare for it. It can happen. Sometimes people are hooked in, and you don’t know they’re hooked in, they’re hooked into your line, and they don’t even mean bad by it.”
Trump added that his administration will assess how and whether senior White House officials should continue to use Signal, the encrypted messaging app senior cabinet officials were using to discuss an imminent air strike against the Houthis in Yemen.
“But it’s not a perfect technology,” Trump said of Signal, a nongovernment encrypted messaging app. “There is no perfect technology. The really good ones are very cumbersome, very hard to access. And I think we look at we always want to use the best technology. This was the best technology for the moment.”
The president went on to say that the contents of the Signal chat were not classified, as the Atlantic report alleges. According to the report, the magazine’s editor in chief 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.
Goldberg alleged in his report 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.”
Earlier Tuesday, Trump told NBC News that “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.” Throughout the news conference, Trump heaped praise on his national security adviser and said he is being unfairly blamed by the media for the story, which the White House has called a “nonissue.”
Waltz was in the room for Tuesday’s meeting with ambassador nominees and used the opportunity to impugn Goldberg’s credibility.
“Mr. President, you asked about lessons. I think there’s a lot of the lessons,” Waltz told reporters in the room. “There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves making up lies about this president, whether it’s the Russia hoax or making up lies about Gold Star families,” before going on to address Goldberg. “And this one in particular, I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with,” Waltz said. “We are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room.”
Waltz said the president’s national security team is investigating the matter.
“We have our technical experts looking at it. We have our legal teams looking at it, and of course, we’re going to keep everything as secure as possible,” Waltz added. “No one in your national security team would ever put anyone in danger. And as you said, we’ve repeatedly said the attack was phenomenal and it’s ongoing.”
Also during Tuesday’s gaggle with the White House press pool, Trump said he will assess whether senior administration officials should be using Signal for White House in the future.
“We’ll look into it, but everybody else seems to be using it,” he said, adding that if it were up to him, “everybody would be sitting in a room together, the room would have solid lead walls and a lead ceiling and a lead floor.”
Trump himself has a blemished record when it comes to handling classified information. He was charged in 2023 with willfully retaining classified national defense information after refusing to return classified White House documents which he had taken to his Mar a Lago resort after leaving office. A federal judge dismissed the case last year after determining that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment violated the law. Smith’s appeal of that decision was dismissed after Trump won reelection.