National Security Adviser Mike Waltz hasn’t been cowed by the embarrassing revelation that he added the editor of The Atlantic to a group chat in which top Trump administration officials shared imminent American war plans.
The confidant of President Donald Trump’s dander was all the way up when reporters asked him about his role in the leak on Tuesday. Rather than showing an ounce of contrition, Waltz took the opportunity to accuse editor Jeffrey Goldberg of being a liar, calling the controversy around his own lack of care with sensitive information another “hoax” from hostile media.
“There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves, making up lies about this president, whether it’s the Russia hoax or making up lies about Gold Star families,” Waltz said.
Goldberg reported that Waltz added him to a group chat on the messaging app Signal earlier this month. In that chat, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance and other administration officials discussed an upcoming airstrike in Yemen. Waltz fully side-stepped his responsibility in adding Goldberg to the group.
“I’ve never met [him], don’t know [him], never communicated with [him], and we are and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” Waltz said.
The denial from Waltz is the second to come out of the group that allegedly took part in the leaked conversation. On Monday, Hegseth told reporters that “nobody was texting war plans” and accused Goldberg of peddling “garbage.”
Waltz’s refutation gives a glimpse of what appears to be a larger Trump administration strategy around the leaks. It seems the officials involved in the scandal want to deny it ever happened in the hopes that the news cycle will move on before they face any consequences for their lax security.
“This journalist…wants the world talking about more hoaxes and this kind of nonsense rather than the freedom that [President Trump is] enabling,” he said.
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