Waltz claims 'full responsibility' for adding journalist to Signal group but can't explain how it happened
In an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox, Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, insisted that he does not know and has never texted with Jeffrey Goldberg, the well-connected Atlantic editor who was added to his Signal group chat to discuss strikes on Yemen.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” Waltz said, of how, exactly, Goldberg was added to the Signal group created on his phone. “I just talked to Elon on the way here,” Waltz added, referring to the president’s most senior adviser, Elon Musk. “We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.”
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, spoke to Laura Ingraham on Fox on Tuesday.
Despite that suggestion that there was some sort of technical glitch behind the accidental leak of secret defense information, Waltz then offered a much simpler explanation. “Have you ever had somebody’s contact, that shows their name, and then you have somebody else’s number there?” he asked.
Waltz said that he had intended to add someone else to the caht, and thought that he had done so, but mistakenly had Goldberg’s number under that other person’s name in his phone contacts.
That explanation, however – that Waltz had a contact for someone else in his phone to which he, or an aide, had mistakenly added Goldberg’s number – seems to contradict the national security adviser’s repeated claims, in the same interview, that he does not know Goldberg. “I don’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone and we’re going to figure out how this happened,” Waltz assured Ingraham.
Although Trump told NBC News earlier in the day that an aide to Waltz was responsible for putting Goldberg’s number on the phone, Waltz himself told Ingraham that no one on his staff was to blame.
“Well, look, a staffer wasn’t responsible, and I take full responsibility, I built the group.”
We are closing our live coverage of the Trump restoration for the day, but will return on Wednesday to continue. Here are some of the day’s developments:
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, told Laura Ingraham on Fox that he accepts “full responsibility” for adding creating a Signal group to discuss confidential war plans, but is still unclear about how he added the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg by mistake.
Donald Trump kept downplaying national security concerns on Tuesday after top White House officials added a journalist to a Signal chat discussing plans to conduct military strikes in Yemen.
The Senate voted to confirm Marty Makary as the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health. Both men were skeptics of the Covid-19 response.
In a letter to Trump on Tuesday, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic minority in the House, demanded that the president fire his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, for disclosing secret war plans for strikes on Yemen to a Signal group that included a journalist.
Ignoring the uproar in Greenland over the plan for his wife, Usha Vance, to visit the territory this week without an invitation, the US vice-president, JD Vance, announced in a video message that he plans to join her. The White House did, however, scrap plans for the second lady to attend a public event.
Democratic senators grilled Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence and CIA director John Ratcliffe about the chat that discussed war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen. Gabbard claimed that “there was no classified material” in the Signal chat.
Critics of Covid-19 pandemic response confirmed to lead FDA and NIH
The Senate voted on Tuesday to confirm Marty Makary as the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health.
Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon, and Bhattacharya, a Stanford health economist, were both celebrated skeptics of the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Makary, who questioned mask mandates in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, and frequently appeared on Fox to criticize the Biden administration’s promotion of vaccines, also told Congress the federal government was the “greatest perpetrator of misinformation” about Covid-19.
In October 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting most people contract Covid-19 infections in pursuit of herd immunity.
“The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity” Bhattacharya and his co-authors wrote, “is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
This approach, which then president Donald Trump supported in the closing months of the 2020 presidential election campaign, while frequently calling it “herd mentality”, was based on the false hope that the virus would not mutate into new variants and people would only get infected once with the illness.
Five cabinet members sued for allegedly violating federal records law by using auto-delete Signal chat to plan strikes
The nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against five Trump administration officials for violating the Federal Records Act and Administrative Procedure Act by using a Signal group set to auto-delete to coordinate military strikes on Yemen.
The suit, filed in federal court in Washington DC, claims that the use of Signal for official business was already a violation of the federal law that mandates the preservation of government records, even before the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the chat.
“The lawsuit seeks to prevent further unlawful destruction of federal records and to compel the recovery of any records created through their unauthorized use of Signal,” the watchdog group said in a statement.
The suit names five cabinet members as defendants: the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; the CIA director, John Ratcliffe; the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent; and secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
“War planning doesn’t belong in emoji-laden disappearing group chats,” Chioma Chukwu, interim director of American Oversight, said. “It belongs in secure facilities designed to safeguard national interests – something any responsible government official should have known. Our lawsuit seeks to ensure these federal records are preserved and recovered.”
Waltz claims 'full responsibility' for adding journalist to Signal group but can't explain how it happened
In an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox, Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, insisted that he does not know and has never texted with Jeffrey Goldberg, the well-connected Atlantic editor who was added to his Signal group chat to discuss strikes on Yemen.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” Waltz said, of how, exactly, Goldberg was added to the Signal group created on his phone. “I just talked to Elon on the way here,” Waltz added, referring to the president’s most senior adviser, Elon Musk. “We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.”
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, spoke to Laura Ingraham on Fox on Tuesday.
Despite that suggestion that there was some sort of technical glitch behind the accidental leak of secret defense information, Waltz then offered a much simpler explanation. “Have you ever had somebody’s contact, that shows their name, and then you have somebody else’s number there?” he asked.
Waltz said that he had intended to add someone else to the caht, and thought that he had done so, but mistakenly had Goldberg’s number under that other person’s name in his phone contacts.
That explanation, however – that Waltz had a contact for someone else in his phone to which he, or an aide, had mistakenly added Goldberg’s number – seems to contradict the national security adviser’s repeated claims, in the same interview, that he does not know Goldberg. “I don’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone and we’re going to figure out how this happened,” Waltz assured Ingraham.
Although Trump told NBC News earlier in the day that an aide to Waltz was responsible for putting Goldberg’s number on the phone, Waltz himself told Ingraham that no one on his staff was to blame.
“Well, look, a staffer wasn’t responsible, and I take full responsibility, I built the group.”
Waltz and Hegseth remind Trump that Jeffrey Goldberg first reported he called fallen troops 'suckers' and 'losers'
When Donald Trump turned to his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, on Tuesday and asked him to comment on what, in other administrations, would have been a career-ending blunder – his accidental inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, in a Signal group chat about strikes on Yemen this month – Waltz began by doing something he knew would please his boss. He attacked Goldberg.
“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,” Waltz said. “And this one in particular, I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with, and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room”.
On Tuesday at the White House, Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, derided Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist he accidentally included in a Signal group chat about strikes on Yemen this month.
“Look, this journalist, Mr President, wants the world talking about more hoaxes and this kind of nonsense, rather than the freedom that you’re enabling,” Waltz added.
By attacking Goldberg as purveyor of “hoaxes”, Waltz seemed to be following the lead of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, who had also accused Goldberg of inventing stories detrimental to Trump. While Waltz made an oblique reference to reports about Trump and “Gold Star families”, which is the term used by the US military for the relatives of soldiers killed in battle, Hegseth was more direct. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession out of peddling hoaxes”, including, Hegseth said, “the suckers and losers hoax”.
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, speaking to reporters in Hawaii on Monday.
That was a reference to Goldberg’s 2020 report that senior officials had told him that Trump had disparaged soldiers who gave their lives in battle as “suckers” and “losers”.
Here’s how that article, published in the heat of the 2020 election campaign, began:
When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Although viewers of rightwing news outlets, like Trump, firmly believe that this reporting, like reporting on Russia’s established efforts to help Trump win the presidency in 2016, was “a hoax”, it was, in fact, confirmed on the record four years later by John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff in his first term.
But, by reminding Trump that it was Goldberg who first revealed that he had criticized dead troops, Hegseth and Waltz seem to be hoping to redirect anger away from them and in the direction of the reporter.
Trump’s comments at the same White House event seemed to suggest that the effort was working, at least for now. “I happen to know,” Trump said of Goldberg a minute after Waltz finished speaking, “the guy’s a total sleazebag.”
“The Atlantic is a failed magazine, does very, very poorly, nobody gives a damn about it,” Trump continued. “I will tell you this: they’ve made up more stories, and they’re just a failing magazine, the public understands that.”
In the last weeks of the 2024 presidential election campaign, Goldberg published another report that was deeply unflattering to Trump, also based on his access to Washington insiders who had worked for Trump in his first term. In that article, Goldberg reported both that Trump had praised Hitler’s generals to Kelly, and that the president had reneged on a promise to pay for the funeral of a young female soldier who had been murdered by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas.
Jeffries, top House Democrat, calls on Trump to fire Hegseth over Signal breach
In a letter to Donald Trump on Tuesday, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic minority in the House, demanded that the president fire his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, for disclosing secret war plans for strikes on Yemen to a Signal group that included a journalist.
“Pete Hegseth is the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in American history. His continued presence in the top position of leadership at the Pentagon threatens the nation’s security and puts our brave men and women in uniform throughout the world in danger,” Jeffries wrote.
“The so-called Secretary of Defense recklessly and casually disclosed highly sensitive war plans – including te timing of a pending attack, possible strike targets and the weapons to be used – during an unclassified national security group chat that inexplicably included a reporter”, he added. “His behavior shocks the conscience, risked American lives and likely violated the law”.
“Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth should be fired immediately,” Jeffries concluded.
Judge bars immigration officials from arresting Columbia student protester Yunseo Chung
A federal judge in Manhattan issued a temporary restraining order on Tuesday barring immigration officials from detaining Yunseo Chung, a Columbia University student and legal permanent resident the Trump administration is trying to deport for taking part in Gaza solidarity protests.
The 21-year-old green card holder, who moved to the United States as a child, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday, arguing the government is “attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike”.
The US district judge Naomi Reice Buchwald said in court that the government had not laid out enough facts about its claims against Chung. She then granted the restraining order Chung had requested, which also prohibits the government from moving her outside the jurisdiction of the southern district of New York.
According to an account of the hearing from a reporter, Matthew Russell Lee, a federal prosecutor asked the judge why she had included a provision that Chung not be moved out of the jurisdiction if she is eventually detained. “No trips to Louisiana, as in that other case in this court,” Buchwald replied, in reference to the transfer of Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia student protester, and green card holder, the government is attempting to deport.
In a statement on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said she had “engaged in concerning conduct”, including being arrested at a protest.
Chung’s suit said immigration officials moved to deport her after she was identified in news reports as one of several protesters arrested after a sit-in at a library on the nearby Barnard College campus this month.
Days later, officials told her lawyer that her permanent resident status was being revoked. Agents came looking for her at her parents’ home and also executed a search warrant at her Columbia dormitory, according to the suit.
Chung has lived in the US since emigrating from South Korea with her parents at the age seven, according to her lawsuit.
The Columbia junior’s lawsuit cites the administration’s efforts to deport other students who participated in protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza. They include Khalil and Momodou Taal of Cornell University, who received a notice last week to surrender to immigration authorities after he sued on 15 March to pre-empt deportation efforts.
Usha Vance will no longer attend dogsled race in Greenland, White House says
Following widespread anger in Greenland over Usha Vance’s plan to attend a dogsled race on the island this week, without an invitation from the organizers, the White House just canceled that public appearance.
Instead, she will now join her husband, JD Vance, on a visit to the US-controlled Pituffik space base in Greenland “to receive a briefing on Arctic security issues and meet with US servicemembers”.
That visit, the White House told reporters, “will take place in lieu of the second lady’s previously announced visit to the Avannaata Qimussersu dogsled race in Sisimiut”.
JD Vance announces he is going to Greenland this week
Ignoring the uproar in Greenland over the plan for his wife, Usha Vance, to visit the territory this week without an invitation, the US vice-president, JD Vance, just announced in a video message posted on X that he now plans to join her.
“I decided that I didn’t want her to have all that fun by herself, so I’m going to join her,” Vance said. “I’m going to visit some of our guardians in the space force on the north-west coast of Greenland, and also just check out what’s going on with the security there of Greenland.”
News of the vice-president’s arrival is unlikely to placate the concerns expressed this week by both Greenland’s current prime minister and his successor.
“Denmark, which controls Greenland, its not doing its job and its not being a good ally. So you have to ask yourself:‘How are we going to solve that problem, solve our national security?’” Vance told Fox on Sunday.
“If that means that we need to take more territorial interest in Greenland, that is what President Trump is going to do, because he doesn’t care about what the Europeans scream at us, he cares about putting the interests of America’s citizens first,” he said.
Earlier on Tuesday, Rasmus Jarlov,a conservative member of the Danish parliament,reacted with fury to a claim fromthe senator Tommy Tuberville, also on Fox, that the people of Greenland are “all in” on joining the United States.
“A recent very large poll showed that 85% are against leaving Denmark to become part of the USA. Only 6% supported it. It is almost unanimous. Never has a NO been clearer” Jarlov wrote. “Yet these f….. people just continue to lie and tell the American public that people in Greenland want to be part of the USA. And the American ‘journalists’ let them get away with it.”
Pentagon warned staffers against using Signal before White House chat leak, NPR reports
José Olivares
The Pentagon recently warned its employees against using Signal, the encrypted messaging app, due to a technical vulnerability, an NPR report reveals.
The report comes one day after the Atlantic published a story detailing how top national security officials, including the US vice-president and US defense secretary, had accidentally added a journalist to a Signal group chat, which revealed plans for military strikes in Yemen.
The Atlantic’s revelations sparked widespread outrage at the security lapse and sent ripples of shock at the breach through diplomatic circles across the world. However, Trump administration officials have tried to play down the sensitivity of the information exposed to the journalist.
But according to a Pentagon “OPSEC special bulletin” seen by NPR reporters and sent on 18 March, Russian hacking groups may exploit the vulnerability in Signal to spy on encrypted organizations, potentially targeting “persons of interest”.
Signal uses end-to-end encryption for its messaging and calls. It is also an “open source” application, meaning the app’s code is open to independent review for any vulnerabilities. The app is typically used as a secure method to communicate.
The Pentagon-wide memo said “third party messaging apps” like Signal are permitted to be used to share unclassified information, but they are not allowed to be used to send “non-public” unclassified information.
In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for Signal said they were “not aware of any vulnerabilities or supposed ones that we haven’t addressed publicly”.
US academic groups sue White House over planned deportations of pro-Gaza students
US academic groups have sued the Trump administration in an effort to block the deportation of foreign students and scholars who have been targeted for voicing pro-Palestinian views and criticism of Israel.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (Mesa) filed a lawsuit at a US federal court in Boston on Tuesday accusing the administration of fomenting “a climate of repression” on campuses and stifling constitutionally guaranteed free speech rights.
Lawyers acting for the groups warn that the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech is likely to herald a broad clampdown on dissenting views in higher education and elsewhere.
The suit comes after the high-profile arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian former graduate student of Columbia University in New York, who holds a green card, and Badar Khan Suri, an Indian post-doctoral student at Georgetown University, both of whom are in detention amid government efforts to deport them. Both had been vocal in support of the Palestinians. Lawyers for both men are disputing the legality of the Trump administration’s efforts to deport them.
Another student green card holder, Yunseo Chung, who had also attended protests at Columbia, sued the administration on Monday after immigration officials tried to arrest her. Ice officials told her lawyer that her green card had been revoked. Chung has been in the US since the age of seven.
The academics’ lawsuit filed on Tuesday alleges that Donald Trump and other US officials are pursuing an “ideological-deportation policy” and accuses the administration of deliberately suppressing freedom of expression by construing opinions supporting Palestinians and criticising Israel’s military actions in Gaza as “pro-Hamas”.
The Guardian’s Robert Tait gives us the full story:
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is calling for a “full investigation” in the Senate, challenging Republicans to join in inquiring how national security leaders came to discuss wartime plans on a secure messaging app chat that also included the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.
Senate leaders speak on intelligence leaders texting war plans on Signal. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
However, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters an investigation was “already happening”, with the Trump administration’s intelligence leaders facing tough questioning at a Senate intelligence committee hearing on Tuesday.
Thune added that the Senate armed services committee “may want to have some folks testify and have some of those questions answered as well”.
The top Republican and Democratic senators on the armed services committee have been discussing how to proceed with an investigation.
President Donald Trump called the messaging app Signal “the best technology for the moment”.
Trump said his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, should not apologize after the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly included in the Signal group chat.
“I don’t think he should apologize,” Trump said on Tuesday. “I think he’s doing his best. It’s equipment and technology that’s not perfect, and probably he won’t be using it again.”
Trump downplays Signal blunder: 'there was no classified information'
President Donald Trump kept downplaying national security concerns on Tuesday after top White House officials added a journalist to a Signal chat discussing plans to conduct military strikes in Yemen.
“There was no classified information, as I understand it,” Trump said in a meeting with US ambassadors. “I hear it’s used by a lot of groups. It’s used by the media a lot. It’s used by a lot of the military, and I think, successfully, but sometimes somebody can get on to those things. That’s one of the prices you pay when you’re not sitting in the Situation Room.”
He later called the Atlantic, a magazine with over two million followers on X, “a failed magazine” and its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was added to the Signal chat, “a total sleazebag”.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting law firm Jenner and Block for previously employing former Special Counsel Robert Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.
“We’ve taken action against a number of law firms that have participated either in the weaponization of government, the weaponization of the legal system for political ends, or have otherwise engaged in illegal or inappropriate activities,” said White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf.
“The law firm of Jenner & Block is one of these law firms,” Scharf said, as he handed the order to Trump in the Oval Office.
