Source: The Ingraham Angle
US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz has taken “full responsibility” for the embarrassing blunder in which a journalist was added to a secret high-level discussion of sensitive war plans.
It came as the Trump administration continued to try to contain the fallout from inadvertently adding a magazine journalist to the private group of officials discussing plans for looming military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen.
“I take full responsibility. I built the group,” Waltz told Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle on Monday (local time).
“It’s embarrassing. We’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
He again insisted no classified information had been shared.
Waltz inadvertently invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, to the encrypted chat on called Houthi PC Small Group on March 11. Others in the chat included US Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Rafcliffe.
US national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe – both of whom were in the chat – repeated the claim to the US Senate Intelligence Committee that no classified material was shared in the group chat on Signal, an encrypted commercial messaging app.
But Democratic senators voiced skepticism, noting that the journalist, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, had reported Hegseth posted operational details about pending strikes against Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis, “including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing”.
Committee members said they planned – and Gabbard and Ratcliffe agreed to – an audit of the exchange.
Hegseth has repeatedly denied posting any war plans – but Goldberg told CNN he had seen plans for the attack in Yemen, hours before it happened.
Source: CNN
The Senate’s Republican majority leader, John Thune, said he expected the Senate Armed Services Committee to look into Trump administration officials’ use of Signal.
“It’s hard for me to believe that targets and timing and weapons would not have been classified,” Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said at the contentious hearing, which featured several sharp exchanges.
Gabbard repeatedly referred questions about the exchange to Hegseth and the Department of Defence.
She and Ratcliffe will face more lawmakers on Wednesday when the House of Representatives holds its annual “Worldwide Threats” hearing. Democrats said they planned to discuss the Signal chat.
The revelation on Monday drew outrage and disbelief among national security experts and prompted Democrats – and some of President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans – to call for an investigation of what they called a major security breach.
“I am of the view that there ought to be resignations, starting with the national security adviser and the secretary of defence,” Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said at the hearing.
But Trump voiced support for his national security team when questioned about the incident at a White House event on Tuesday with Waltz.
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump told NBC News when asked if he still had confidence in his top national security aide.
He also said Waltz “will continue to do a good job” and that he did not need to apologise. Trump blamed the blunder on a low-level staffer.
“It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there,” he said.
He said his administration would look into the use of Signal, and that he did not expect Waltz and his team would keep using it.
Senior members of the Trump administration have also railed against Goldberg personally. The President called him a “total sleaze bag”, Waltz described him as “the bottom scum of journalists” and Hegseth said he was a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called ‘journalist’ who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again”.
In a post on X, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has accused Goldberg of sensationalising the story.
Also on X, White House communications director Steven Cheung dismissed concerns over the incident as “faux outrage”.
-with AAP
Trump chiefs grilled over war texting 'sloppiness'
Trump chiefs grilled over war texting 'sloppiness'