President Donald Trump defended National Security Advisor Michael Waltz during an ambassador meeting on Monday, as his administration faces fierce backlash over the recent Signal text chain leak.
Waltz, whose staffers had unknowingly added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group chat where Secretary of State Pete Hegseth and others discussed sensitive war plans, has come under fire for the blunder. Speaking to a room full of reporters, Trump said he believes Waltz is ‘doing his best.’
‘I don’t think he should apologize,’ the president said. ‘I think he’s doing his best. It’s equipment and technology that’s not perfect.’
‘And, probably, he won’t be using it again, at least not in the very near future,’ he added.
Goldberg was added to the national security discussion, called ‘Houthi PC Small Group’, earlier in March. He was able to learn about attacks against Houthi fighters in Yemen long before the public.
‘According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time,’ Goldberg wrote in his piece about the experience. ‘So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.’
Though Goldberg’s inclusion in the chat did not foil the military’s plans, the national security breach has still stunned both supporters and critics of the Trump administration. During the Tuesday meeting, Trump also said that he was in contact with Waltz over whether hackers can break into Signal conversations.
‘Are people able to break into conversations? And if that’s true, we’re gonna have to find some other form of device,’ Trump said. ‘And I think that’s something that we may have to do. Some people like Signal very much, other people probably don’t, but we’ll look into it.’
‘Michael, I’ve asked you to immediately study that and find out if people are able to break into a system,’ he added.
In response, Waltz assured Trump that he has White House technical experts ‘looking at’ the situation, along with legal teams.
‘And of course, we’re going to keep everything as secure as possible,’ the national security official said. ‘No one in your national security team would ever put anyone in danger. And as you said, we’ve repeatedly said the attack was phenomenal, and it’s ongoing.’