The Fallout from the National Security Leak
President Donald Trump was upset when he found out that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally included a journalist in a group chat discussing plans for a military strike. But it wasn’t just because Waltz had potentially exposed national security secrets.
Trump was mad — and suspicious — that Waltz had Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number saved in his phone in the first place, according to three people familiar with the situation, who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. A fourth person said the president was also particularly perturbed by the embarrassing nature of the episode.
“The president was pissed that Waltz could be so stupid,” the person said. (A “Mike Waltz” invited Goldberg to the chat, according to The Atlantic).
But by Tuesday afternoon, the two men had made a show of smoothing things over and the White House was closing ranks around Waltz. Trump conducted brief interviews with both NBC News and Fox News pledging to stand behind his national security adviser. Two top Trump spokespeople suggested in posts on X that national security hawks were colluding with the media to make the issue bigger than it actually was. And Waltz attended a meeting of Trump’s ambassadors Tuesday afternoon.
“There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves making up lies … This one in particular I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with, and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” Waltz said during the meeting.
Trump followed up by calling Waltz “a very good man” and suggested he had been unfairly attacked. Yet the president also said he would look into government officials’ use of Signal, the app used in the chat with Goldberg that could have resulted in a security breach as top U.S. officials discussed plans to launch strikes in Yemen.
Still, several Trump allies cautioned this may not be the end of Waltz’s troubles. One of them, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter, said the incident has strained Waltz’s relationship with Trump’s inner circle.
The Tuesday afternoon meeting capped a tumultuous 24 hours as the White House — which has for the last two months been run with more discipline, loyalty and structure than Trump’s chaotic first term — struggled with how to respond to its first major leak, one that could have jeopardized national security.
Trump and his allies have long been suspicious of leaks, viewing staffers who speak with certain reporters — or who are in contact with reporters who are not in staffers’ area of coverage — with deep suspicion. Unlike the first administration, Trump’s second White House has been relatively leak-free, an artifact of chief of staff Susie Wiles’ strong hand and a fact that Trump staffers were preemptively vetted for loyalty before they joined the administration.
A different Trump ally has gone as far as to look through the phone of someone they suspected of leaking — trying to find the latest reporter they were in contact with, a person familiar with the internal dynamics granted anonymity to discuss them said. In other instances, Trump campaign advisers have complained about another staffer being in touch with political reporters when that was not their lane. During the transition, they have also spread and threatened to spread information that was not true to discern where leaks were coming from.
That made the Monday episode a particularly embarrassing blunder for an administration that has spent two months arguing it will not tolerate leaks. Not only was the leak of sensitive military details by top officials a clumsy accident, it also involved a reporter and an outlet the administration sees as diametrically opposed to its agenda.
Goldberg was added to a group chat on the encrypted messaging app, earlier this month by Waltz. The group contained a number of other top administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others. In the chat, named “Houthi PC small group,” the officials discussed details of a then-forthcoming military strike on the Houthis.
The leak, though accidental, was made all the more thorny for Waltz by Trump’s hatred of the Atlantic. The president has long held a grudge against the magazine for an article in which it leaned on anonymous sources to report that Trump had called Americans who died in war “suckers and losers,” and the Atlantic was one of the first prominent voices calling for Trump’s impeachment during his first term, emblazoning the word “IMPEACH” in bold, red type across the cover of its March 2019 issue.
A third Trump ally, granted anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations, called the issue “serious” but echoed the administration’s message that “the way it has been characterized in the media is exaggerated and histrionic.”
In his article, Goldberg said he did not publish some of the messages in his piece out of concern that they “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.”
Despite spending Monday questioning whether Waltz needed to resign, the White House and its allies on Tuesday sought to downplay the sensitivity of the information shared in the group chat. Officials suggested the national security community, in collaboration with the media, was making a bigger deal out of the issue than it was, arguing the material was not classified and suggesting Goldberg had sensationalized the content.
“The Atlantic story is nothing more than a section of the NatSec establishment community running the same, tired gameplay from years past,” White House communications director Steven Cheung posted on X. “From the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax of the first term to the fake documents case of the last four years… at every turn anti-Trump forces have tried to weaponize innocuous actions and turn them into faux outrage that Fake News outlets can use to peddle misinformation.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in a statement reiterated that the president “has the utmost confidence in Mike Waltz and his entire national security team.”
One of the people familiar with the episode said Trump wasn’t upset about national security concerns because the operation against the Houthis had been a success.
At the same time, Waltz and his allies offered up a reason why he would have had Goldberg’s number in his phone as concerns rippled through the more isolationist elements of the MAGA base that Waltz had been leaking to Goldberg. A senior White House official told Fox News that Waltz had never met or spoken to Goldberg, and Goldberg’s number was “added to a contact card by one of the Trump administration staffers.”
However, Waltz, in an interview with Fox News Tuesday night, said a staffer wasn’t responsible and that he was taking “full responsibility” and that he made a “mistake.” But he insisted that Goldberg’s number had been erroneously added to someone else’s contact.
“I built the group,” Waltz said. “My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.”
A second person familiar with the matter said Trump spoke with Waltz multiple times about the Atlantic story on Monday, while a third person said the White House counsel had been looking into it at one point.
Just last week, Trump in a post on Truth Social in response to an interview request from the magazine called it a “third rate” publication that “has absolutely no credibility” and “will hopefully fold up and be gone in the not too distant future.”
While Tuesday appeared to smooth over immediate concerns about Waltz, some people close to the White House argued the incident is likely to leave a lasting mark. Pushing Waltz out now could disturb the relative harmony this administration has seen.
“If you let scalps fall off right now — that could set a bad precedent,” another person familiar with the incident said.
That leaves Waltz in a precarious position with the “America First” contingent of the administration and outside allies who would be all too happy to see him removed from office, suspicious of his neoconservative underpinnings.
“The president trusts his team a lot more than he did during his first term. But he is still someone who doesn’t easily forget about mistakes, so just because he’s not getting rid of Waltz or one of the others today, doesn’t mean a day won’t come when a person will sort of run out of rope,” a person close to the White House said. “If he starts to question someone’s judgment or instincts — or even worse, their loyalty — then it can become a situation where it’s only a matter of time.”
