National security advisor Mike Waltz said he accepted “full responsibility” for a high-level Trump administration planning chat about strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen being accidentally shared with a top journalist from The Atlantic.
"I take full responsibility. I built the group," Waltz told Fox News’s Ingraham Angle on Tuesday. "It's embarrassing. We're going to get to the bottom of it."
Waltz went on to call Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote a widely read article reporting that Waltz added him to a Signal group discussing the strikes, was a “loser” who may have “deliberately” tricked someone in the administration into getting access to the chat.
The administration dismissed Goldberg as a reporter who peddled in “hoaxes” hours earlier, despite a National Security Council spokesperson confirming the authenticity of the messages.
The Atlantic has said it stands by its reporting, which says that Trump administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance discussed detailed aspects of the strikes including targets and weapons details, breaking with normal protocols (and potentially federal espionage law) that require discussing such sensitive information over secure government channels.
"Attempts to disparage and discredit The Atlantic, our editor, and our reporting follow an obvious playbook by elected officials and others in power who are hostile to journalists and the First Amendment rights of all Americans,” a spokesperson for the magazine told NBC News. “Our journalists are continuing to fearlessly and independently report the truth in the public interest.”
In a phone interview with the broadcaster Tuesday morning, Trump claimed that Waltz was “a good man” who had “learned his lesson” and would not be fired. The president also blamed sharing the messages on an error from “one of Michael’s people” that did not amount to a “serious” issue.
The White House has said Waltz will lead a probe into the leak, and the national security advisor told Fox News some of the “best technical minds” are investigating what happened.
The administration has attempted to downplay the leak scandal, claiming that no classified materials were sent in the thread, though it has maintained elsewhere in a lawsuit regarding deportation flights to El Salvador that reminiscent operational details are state secrets outside the jurisdiction of even federal court scrutiny.
The Pentagon warned officials around the time of the leak that government officials shouldn’t use Signal, an encrypted messaging app, even for sharing unclassified material because of a “vulnerability” leaving it open to exploitation by foreign adversaries.
Top Democrats have sharply criticized the leak and called for top officials involved to resign.
“I think it’s clear that Secretary Hegseth is not ready for prime time, but he has the capacity to undermine the security of the United States,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a member of the Armed Services Committee, told The Independent.
Andrew Feinberg and Eric Garcia contributed reporting to this story.
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