Hugo Lowell
The Guardian / April 6, 2025
Internal investigation cleared the national security adviser Mike Waltz, but the mistake was months in the making.
Washington – Donald Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz included a journalist in the Signal group chat about plans for US strikes in Yemen after he mistakenly saved his number months before under the contact of someone else he intended to add, according to three people briefed on the matter.
The mistake was one of several missteps that came to light in the White House’s internal investigation, which showed a series of compounding slips that started during the 2024 campaign and went unnoticed until Waltz created the group chat last month.
Trump briefly considered firing Waltz over the episode, more angered by the fact that Waltz had the number of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic – a magazine he despises – than the fact that the military operation discussion took place on an unclassified system such as Signal.
But Trump decided against firing him in large part because he did not want the Atlantic and the news media more broadly to have the satisfaction of forcing the ouster of a top cabinet official weeks into his second term. Trump was also mollified by the findings of the internal investigation.
The disclosures nonetheless triggered a “forensic review” by the White House information technology office, which found that Waltz’s phone had saved Goldberg’s number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October.
According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.
Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.
Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.
A day after that Goldberg story was published, on 22 October, Waltz appeared on CNN to defend Trump. “Don’t take it from me, take it from the 13 Abbey Gate Gold Star families, some of whom stood on a stage in front of a 30,000 person crowd and said how he helped them heal,” Waltz said.
According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.
The mistake went unnoticed until last month when Waltz sought to add Hughes to the Signal group chat – but ended up adding Goldberg’s number to the 13 March message chain named “Houthi PC small group”, where several top US officials discussed plans for strikes against the Houthis.
Waltz said in the immediate aftermath of the incident that he had never met or communicated with Goldberg. He also suggested on Fox News that Goldberg’s number had been “sucked” into his phone, seemingly in reference to how his iPhone had saved Goldberg’s number.
The White House did not comment on this story, and the investigation did not resolve the extent of Waltz’s relationship with Goldberg, if any. Reached by phone on Saturday, Goldberg said: “I’m not going to comment on my relationship with Mike Waltz beyond saying I do know him and have spoken to him.”
Trump was briefed on the findings of the forensic review last week around the time he decided to keep Waltz, a person familiar with the matter said. Trump accepted Waltz’s mea culpa and has publicly defended him in recent weeks since the group chat situation became public.
When Trump left the White House on Thursday, he was joined aboard Marine One by his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, his personnel chief, Sergio Gor, and Waltz, which aides took as a show of support for the embattled national security adviser.
Waltz also appears to have also engendered some sympathy from inside Trump’s orbit over the group chat because the White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies, two people familiar with the matter said.
Previous administrations, including the Biden White House, did not develop an alternative platform to Signal, one of the people said. As a temporary solution, the Trump White House told officials to use Signal as they had done during the transition instead of regular text-message chains.
Hugo Lowell is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Guardian covering Donald Trump and the Justice Department
__________
Mike Waltz’s team set up at least 20 Signal chats for national security work – report
Joseph Gedeon
The Guardian / April 2, 2025
National security adviser and team shared ‘sensitive information’ in group chats on app, sources tell Politico.
Washington – Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and his team have created at least 20 different group chats on the encrypted messaging app Signal to coordinate sensitive national security work, sources tell Politico.
The revelation, which cites four people with direct knowledge of the practice, follows heightened scrutiny of the administration’s handling of sensitive information after The Atlantic recently published messages from a chat that included the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, sharing operational details of deadly strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Those anonymous sources told Politico the Signal chats covered a wide range of policy areas, including Ukraine, China, Gaza, broader Middle East policy, Africa and Europe. All four individuals reported seeing “sensitive information” discussed in these forums, though none said they were aware of classified material being shared.
Over the last few days, Waltz’s flippant nature over the protection of national security secrets has been exposed. The Washington Post reported on documents revealing that Waltz’s team had been conducting government business through personal Gmail accounts.
The White House has again defended the practice, with a national security council spokesperson, Brian Hughes, telling Politico that Signal was “not banned from government devices” and was automatically installed on some agencies’ phones.
“It is one of the approved methods of communicating but is not the primary or even secondary,” Hughes said, adding that any claim of classified information being shared was “100% untrue.”
The insistence by administration officials that none of the messages were classified, including past remarks by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and Hegseth, fly in the face of the defense department’s own rulebook on what would count as classified.
In the earlier chat, Hegseth shared specific operational details about military strikes in Yemen, including launch times for F-18 fighter jets and Tomahawk missiles. These details, according to the former state department attorney Brian Finucane, who advised on past strikes on Yemen, would typically be classified based on his experience.
Others in the national security establishment have similarly warned that using a messaging app like Signal could potentially violate federal record-keeping laws if chats are automatically deleted, and could compromise operational security if a phone is seized.
Despite the earlier controversies, Leavitt indicated on Monday that Trump stood firmly behind his national security adviser, and that an investigation into how Waltz accidentally added a journalist to a sensitive chat had been closed.
Joseph Gedeon is a politics breaking news reporter based in Washington
