Mike Waltz Is Rebuked by Team Trump Over Group Chat Leak

Senior Trump administration officials and White House aides had for weeks bragged about how the second Trump era was markedly more disciplined and well-oiled, and less shoot-yourself-in-the-foot shambolic, than the president’s first turn in office. Several of these officials noted to Rolling Stone that this assessment was due in part to the fact that there had been less embarrassing leaking from Donald Trump’s appointees.

Then, Monday happened.

“I see the good ol’ days are back,” says one current Trump administration official, who is also a veteran of the first administration.

Since the news broke that Cabinet-level members of the Trump administration accidentally disclosed plans to bomb Yemen to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal chat, this official and two others say that hardcore so-called “America Firsters” in the administration have amped up an internal whisper campaign against National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who seems to have added Goldberg to the group conversation. They believe the incident proves that Waltz (a former adviser to Dick Cheney, a Kamala Harris-voting Republican) never should have been trusted in the first place, and should be shown the door soon. 

Trump indicated Tuesday morning that Waltz’s position is safe, telling NBC News that his national security adviser “learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.” Trump added later on Tuesday: “No, I don’t think [Waltz] should apologize. I think he’s doing his best.”

Waltz couldn’t seem to get his story straight about what happened while appearing on Fox News later on Tuesday, suggesting that Goldberg may have surreptitiously hacked his way into the chat, while also taking “full responsibility” for the breach and vowing to “get to the bottom” of it. (Trump is apparently putting Waltz in charge of the internal investigation into the matter, if you can believe it.)

“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there?” Waltz told Laura Ingraham, adding: “Of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else. Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is something we’re trying to figure out.”

The three Trump administration officials who spoke to Rolling Stone voiced mild, or at times extreme, displeasure that Waltz apparently allowed Goldberg — who is despised by Trump and many of his lieutenants and confidants — to be on the receiving end of a genuinely big scoop. The officials also say there has been widespread gossiping throughout the new Trump administration about how this series of events is so punishingly dumb, that some White House aides and senior administration hands keep referencing to one another different pieces of television or popular culture to underscore the absurdity of the apparently accidental Signal leak.

“Is Waltz just Jonah from Veep then?” says a Trump appointee, referencing the episode of the HBO political comedy series in which the widely loathed character is fired after it is discovered that he anonymously posted sensitive information to his blog, “West Wing Man.”

Beneath the humor is a gravely serious situation or even, as some would dub it, a scandal that poses real national security risk — given that Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-level officials were involved in the group chat. The situation has generated so much blowback that even Trump acknowledged that it was a “glitch” amid what he described as a “perfect” two months.

“The staggering failure to adhere to even the basic principles of security protocols, especially for senior officials who have a staff to handle the boring details, is an insult to the rest of the cleared community,” says Bradley Moss, an attorney specializing in national security and government transparency issues. “Needless to say, clients I have represented have lost their jobs and their clearances for mishaps that don’t even come close to what occurred here.”

Democrats attempted to highlight the stakes of the breach in a public grilling of CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tusli Gabbard during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday morning, with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) noting that if this happened “with a military officer or an intelligence officer and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired.” 

Ratcliffe and Gabbard, who were both reportedly on the chat, denied that any classified information had been shared, but admitted that Signal was likely an inappropriate channel to discuss plots to bomb another country. They avoided the committee’s request to review the contents of the chat, despite contending its contents weren’t classified. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) warned that the committee would “get the full transcript of this chain” and that Ratcliffe and Gabbard’s testimony “will be measured carefully against its content.”

Time will tell what comes of the Democratic effort to uncover what actually happened. Goldberg on Wednesday released the group chat’s messages detailing the attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen, throwing another bucket of cold water on the administration’s claims that nothing classified was shared in the chat, and that war plans were not discussed. “We are currently clean on OPSEC,” or operational security, Hegseth wrote in one of the newly released messages, which the Pentagon chief blasted to an unsecured chat he didn’t even know who was reading.

The Trump officials who spoke to Rolling Stone are privately bemoaning how much the humiliating national-security breach reminds them of the opening months of the first Trump presidency, when these sorts of — in the words of a White House official — “comically ridiculous” news items of high-level, casual incompetence and self-inflicted chaos reigned supreme.

There have been plenty of these kinds of stories across the second administration, of course, but Team Trump still generally insists its operations are more buttoned-up these days. Given how ruthlessly and quickly they’ve been executing the most openly lawless, corrupt, and cruel parts of Trump’s agenda, they may have at least a minor point.