Donald Trump defended his embattled national security adviser on Tuesday and said the leak of highly classified military plans was “the only glitch in two months”, as scrutiny intensified into how top US officials shared operational details for bombing Yemen in a group chat.
In an interview with NBC, Trump said, “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” as Democrats called for an investigation into the sharing of the plans for this month’s major airstrikes in Yemen on the Signal app.
The Atlantic reported that Waltz, who was a congressman representing Florida before being appointed national security adviser by Trump, sent a connection request on the chat app Signal to the magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on 11 March. Goldberg was then included in a chat group in which detailed information about plans for an attack on the Houthi armed group in Yemen was shared.
Trump told NBC News that Goldberg’s presence in the chat had “no impact at all” on the military operation, and defended Waltz, claiming that the leak was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one”.
Asked how Goldberg was added to the chat, Trump said: “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”
Key figures in the Trump administration, including Waltz, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of state Marco Rubio and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, were present in the Signal chat.
Goldberg said he assumed he was being spoofed until the attacks in Yemen occurred exactly as the participants described in the chat.
Gabbard and other intelligence officials were due to appear before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday morning, when they are likely to face questions about the leak.
While most Republicans, including Trump and the House leader, Mike Johnson, rallied around Waltz, a few joined Democrats in condemning the leak. Don Bacon, a Republican congressman from Nebraska, told CNN the debacle was a “gross error” for which there was “no excuse”.
“They intentionally put highly classified information on an unclassified device. I would have lost my security clearance in the air force for this and for a lot less,” Bacon said. “I will guarantee you, 99.99% with confidence, Russia and China are monitoring those two phones. So I just think it’s a security violation, and there’s no doubt that Russia and China saw this stuff within hours of the actual attacks on Yemen or the Houthis.”
Nick LaLota, a Republican congressman from New York, told Politico: “At minimum, it’s totally sloppy.”
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Hegseth claimed on Monday that “nobody was texting war plans” and said that Goldberg “peddles in garbage”.
Goldberg responded to Hegseth in an interview with MSNBC.
“I haven’t seen this kind of unserious behavior before,” he said.
“And the secretary of defense, all due respect, in that presentation seems like a person who’s unserious and is trying to deflect from the fact that he participated in a conversation on an unclassified commercial messaging app that he probably shouldn’t have participated in.”
