Donald Trump has been unwilling to fire the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, or his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, over the now infamous Signal group chat because doing so would be a tacit admission of fault and seen as handing a victory to the Atlantic magazine, officials close to the president said.
The president has been less interested in the possibility of the plans having been classified or the fact that they were shared in an unclassified commercial app, than the fact that Waltz had the number of the editor-in-chief of a magazine that Trump despises, the officials said.
But after Waltz admitted responsibility for adding a reporter to the Signal chat, Trump offered public support for him and said Waltz had learned his lesson. Trump has not asked for Waltz’s resignation, in large part because he did not want the Atlantic to claim a win, the officials said.
That does not mean Waltz’s position is wholly secure. Trump has been unhappy with the negative coverage over the disclosures that have been the dominant theme in questions from reporters at the White House and in headlines all week since the matter erupted into public view on Monday.
Waltz has separately been in a tenuous position because he has struggled at times to gel with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and the perception in some corners that he lacks major Trump allies as he was endorsed for the position by Senator Lindsey Graham rather than the president’s inner circle.
Trump aides have also been furious at Waltz for trying to claim that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg, or that Goldberg infiltrated the Signal chat, given the suggestions were demonstrably false. Waltz’s failure to immediately acknowledge the mistake prolonged the brouhaha, they said.
The president has also defended Hegseth’s involvement, even though he sent the messages that sparked concerns that information in the Signal chat appeared to be classified. “He had nothing to do with this. Hegseth? How do you bring Hegseth into this?” Trump said.
Trump saw the messages in the Signal chat after they were printed out for him, the officials said.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration’s attempts to defend the leak of sensitive military plans on grounds that they were not classified became harder to reconcile on Wednesday, after the Atlantic published the full text chain showing the level of detail of the attack plans.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, repeated that none of the messages were classified, while Hegseth and other officials made the semantic argument that the messages did not amount to a “war plan”, as they were originally characterized by the Atlantic, which later began using the term “attack plans”.
Former US officials said that technically speaking, a “war plan” would be more specific about the types and routings of weaponry, the coordinates of targets, contingency and backup options, and including a more thorough strategy discussion.
However, the information shared by Hegseth included a summary of operational details about the operation to strike Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, such as the launch times of F-18 fighter jets, the time that the first bombs were expected to drop, and the time that naval Tomahawk missiles would be launched.
The former US officials universally agreed that these military details were sensitive from a national security perspective because the information was shared before the attack began. Had it leaked, the targets could have escaped or otherwise compromised the mission.
The US Department of Defense’s own classification guidelines suggest the kind of detailed military plans in the Signal chat would typically be classified at least at the “secret” level, while some of the real-time updates could have risen to a higher level of classification.
The group chat also included a message from Waltz who shared a real-time update (“first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed”), which would have also ordinarily been classified at least at the “secret” level if it came from an asset operated by the intelligence community.
