Donald Trump.
Donald Trump.
President Donald Trump characterised an extraordinary security breach as a minor transgression on Tuesday, insisting that top administration officials had not shared any classified information as they discussed secret military plans in a group chat that included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine.
“So this was not classified,” Trump said during a meeting with US ambassadors at the White House. “Now if it’s classified information, it’s probably a little bit different, but I always say, you have to learn from every experience.”
Trump also stood by his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who had inadvertently added the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat on the Signal app, which included Vice-President J.D. Vance and others. In the chat, defence secretary Pete Hegseth shared information on timing, targets and weapons systems to be used in an attack on Houthi militants in Yemen, according to Goldberg. “I think it was very unfair the way they attacked Michael,” the President said of Waltz.
Former national security officials said they were sceptical that the information shared by Hegseth ahead of the March 15 strike was not classified, given the life-or-death nature of the operation.
The President and the secretary of defence have the ability to assert, even retroactively, that information is declassified. But officials have refused to answer questions about the specifics of the information or who, exactly, determined that it was unclassified and could be shared on Signal, an encrypted commercial app.
Hegseth denounced Goldberg late on Monday, saying he had been “peddling hoaxes time and time again”. But on Tuesday morning, testifying in the Senate, the nation’s top two intelligence officials conceded that the exchanges released by The Atlantic were accurate.
During the meeting at the White House, as reporters peppered the President with questions about the leak, Trump repeatedly turned to Waltz to answer. Waltz tried to largely redirect the focus, lauding the strikes in Yemen and attacking Goldberg. “This one in particular, I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with,” he said, adding that “we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room.”
Trump called Goldberg a “sleazebag”.
Later on Tuesday, Waltz told the host Laura Ingraham on Fox News that “I take full responsibility” for the sharing of the plans, adding that he had “built the group” and inadvertently added Goldberg to it even as he maintained that “I don’t text him, he’s not on my phone”.
But the overall response from Trump and his allies is a timeworn practice that the administration and its chorus of supporters have deployed throughout the President’s political career as they seek to deflect criticism.
New York Times News Service