Trump stands by national security adviser Mike Waltz despite disclosure of military plans, saying he’s ‘learned a lesson’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump stood by his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was accidentally added to a private, high-level chat on the messaging app Signal in which military plans were being discussed.
"Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man," Trump said Tuesday in a phone interview with NBC News.
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Trump's comments were his first substantive remarks since The Atlantic broke the story, which detailed how journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently added to a group chat on a private messaging app in which plans for military strikes in Yemen were discussed. Goldberg said he was added to the discussion after he received a request from a user identified as Waltz.
Asked what he was told about how Goldberg came to be added to the Signal chat, Trump said: “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”
Trump said Goldberg’s presence in the chat had “no impact at all” on the military operation.
He expressed confidence in his team, saying he was not frustrated by the events leading up to The Atlantic's story. The situation, Trump said, was "the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one."
Waltz said in a Fox News interview Tuesday night that he takes “full responsibility” for organizing the text group, and that a staffer was not to blame for Goldberg appearing in the group.
“I take full responsibility. I built the — I built the group,” Waltz told host Laura Ingraham. “My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.”
The Atlantic’s article sent shock waves across Washington on Monday. Democratic lawmakers demanded answers from the White House in multiple letters, with one from a group of Senate Democrats calling the situation “an astonishingly cavalier approach to national security.”
Top Democrats on the House Armed Services, Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees wrote a separate letter, pushing for answers about other instances in which senior officials discussed national security issues “using the Signal messaging service or any other messaging service application that has not been approved for the transmission of classified information.”
White House officials defended the chat, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claiming Monday that “nobody was texting war plans.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday also claimed that war plans were not discussed and that "no classified material was sent to the thread."
"As the National Security Council stated, the White House is looking into how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread," she added.
In a statement about the incident, the National Security Council said 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 our servicemembers or our national security.”
Trump and Waltz spoke Monday about The Atlantic’s story, according to two sources familiar with their conversation.
The group chat mishap was disclosed 10 years ago to the month after it was revealed that Hillary Clinton used a private email server at times during her tenure as secretary of state in the Obama administration. That revelation prompted staunch criticism from Republicans, several of whom appeared to be part of the Signal chat, according to The Atlantic.
Goldberg reported that he was skeptical about the Signal chat's authenticity at first. But when bombs began falling in Yemen at the time officials in the group chat had discussed it, he concluded that the chat was “almost certainly real” and left shortly afterward.
Trump briefly responded to a question about The Atlantic’s story Monday, saying “I don’t know anything about it” and noting that the reporter asking him about the story was “telling me about it for the first time.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com