Donald Trump defended his embattled national security adviser on Tuesday and said the leak of highly classified military plans was “the only glitch in two months”, as scrutiny intensified into how top US officials shared operational details for bombing Yemen in a group chat.
In an interview with NBC, the president said, “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” as Democrats called for an investigation into the sharing of the plans for this month’s major airstrikes in Yemen on the Signal app. Later on Tuesday, during a meeting with ambassadors, Trump said his administration would investigate the incident but claimed “there was no classified information” shared on Signal.
“Certainly we’ll look at this,” Trump said. “But the main thing was nothing happened. The attack was totally successful.”
The Atlantic reported that Waltz, who was a congressman representing Florida before being appointed national security adviser by Trump, sent a connection request on the chat app Signal to the magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on 11 March. Goldberg was then included in a chat group in which detailed information about plans for an attack on the Houthi armed group in Yemen was shared.
Trump told NBC News that Goldberg’s presence in the chat had “no impact at all” on the military operation, and defended Waltz, claiming that the leak was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one”, as the White House sought to downplay the incident.
Asked how Goldberg was added to the chat, Trump said: “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”
Goldberg said he assumed he was being spoofed until the attacks in Yemen occurred exactly as the participants described in the chat.
In his first public comments since the Atlantic story broke, Waltz on Tuesday said: “We are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room.”
Key figures in the Trump administration, including Waltz; the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; were present in the Signal chat.
On Tuesday morning Gabbard attempted to dodge questions about the leak during a Senate intelligence committee meeting.
“Senator, I don’t want to get into this,” Gabbard said when asked by Mark Warner, the senator from Virginia, if she had participated in the chat.
Appearing alongside the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, Gabbard claimed “there was no classified material” in the Signal chat.
Ratcliffe said that when he was confirmed as CIA director he was briefed by agency officials about “the use of Signal as a permissible work use” and “a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration”.
A White House statement released on Tuesday afternoon said: “Democrats and their media allies have seemingly forgotten that President Donald J Trump and his national security team successfully killed terrorists who have targeted US troops and disrupted the most consequential shipping routes in the world.
“This is a coordinated effort to distract from the successful actions taken by President Trump and his administration to make America’s enemies pay and keep Americans safe.”
While most Republicans, including Trump and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, rallied around Waltz, a few joined Democrats in condemning the leak. Don Bacon, a Republican congressman from Nebraska, told CNN the debacle was a “gross error” for which there was “no excuse”.
“They intentionally put highly classified information on an unclassified device. I would have lost my security clearance in the air force for this and for a lot less,” Bacon said. “I will guarantee you, 99.99% with confidence, Russia and China are monitoring those two phones. So I just think it’s a security violation, and there’s no doubt that Russia and China saw this stuff within hours of the actual attacks on Yemen or the Houthis.”
Nick LaLota, a Republican congressman from New York, told Politico: “At minimum, it’s totally sloppy.”
Hegseth claimed on Monday that “nobody was texting war plans” and said that Goldberg “peddles in garbage”.
Goldberg responded to Hegseth in an interview with MSNBC.
“I haven’t seen this kind of unserious behavior before,” he said.
“And the secretary of defense, all due respect, in that presentation seems like a person who’s unserious and is trying to deflect from the fact that he participated in a conversation on an unclassified commercial messaging app that he probably shouldn’t have participated in.”
