US President Donald Trump has said that a junior staffer working with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is believed to have added The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal group where top officials, including Vice President JD Vance, discussed last week’s strikes on Houthis in Yemen
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US President Donald Trump appears to have zeroed in on the person who added the journalist, The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, to the Signal group where top administration officials discussed the last week’s attacks on Houthis in Yemen.
In an interview with Newsmax, Trump said that a junior staffer with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is believed to have added Goldberg.
Last week, in one of the most scandalous security breaches, Waltz added Goldberg to a Signal group where top administration officials, including Vice Presideent JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, and Waltz, discussed the attacks on Houthis. Hegseth even shared operational plans on the group that Goldberg said contained the timing, weapons package, and specific targets of the operation against Houthis.
Trump told Newsmax, “And what it was, we believe, is somebody that was on the line with permission; somebody that was with Mike Waltz — worked for Mike Waltz at a lower level — had, I guess, Goldberg’s number or called through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call. Now, it wasn’t classified, as I understand it. There was no classified information. There was no problem, and the attack was a tremendous success.”
Even as the Trump administration has downplayed the leak, commentators have said that operational plans are always classified. Trump, however, said, he feels “very comfortable actually” with how the matter was handled.
Even if the plans were not formally classified, the leak was damning as such information in the hands of an adversary could have compromised the operation and likely blown up covers of spies or revealed sources of intelligence-collection. In any case, all the participants in the group chat were in violation of government policy that bars the usage of apps like Signal for such secretive government work — in-house government systems exist for such communication.
Just days before the episode, the Department of Defense had told staffers to not use Signal for official work, according to NPR. Yet the departmental head, Hegseth, not just used the app to discuss the Houthis operation but shared operational plans over the app.