CNN
—
As President Donald Trump’s advisers this week took on the unenviable task of informing him a journalist he loathes was inadvertently added to a group chat discussing secret attack plans, one key detail required some further explanation.
Before Monday, Trump said he had never heard of Signal, the encrypted chat app where his national security adviser, defense secretary, vice president, chief of staff and others had been communicating about the forthcoming strikes on Yemen.
With Trump only a recent convert to texting, a person familiar said he needed an aide to explain what, exactly, his team had been utilizing to convey sensitive details about the timing and targets of the planned attack on Houthi rebels.
In comments over the course of the week, Trump seemed to gain a firmer grasp of the app that had launched a new Washington scandal.
So, too, did he seem to form a stronger opinion of who was to blame. “I was told it was Mike,” Trump said, referring to national security adviser Mike Waltz, whom The Atlantic journalist said had added him to the chat.
The entire episode has frustrated Trump, according to people familiar with his views, in part because he thinks it marred what he sees as a strong start to his second term. Speaking earlier this week, he deemed it the first real “glitch” of his second administration.
His annoyance at the matter has been aggravated because he holds a grudge against the journalist at the center of it all, The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
And, as he absorbed what exactly the Signal app was, he lamented a world where government secrets can be easily tapped out on a mobile phone, suggesting it might not be the wisest idea even as he tried to downplay the fallout.
“If it was up to me, everybody would be sitting in a room together. The room would have solid lead walls and a lead ceiling and a lead floor. But, you know, life doesn’t always let you do that,” Trump said Tuesday.
Afterward, Trump privately told his top officials that guidance for how they use Signal – which a White House official told CNN the president did not have on his phone – should be reviewed, a process that’s expected to take place in the coming weeks.
Trump made a concerted effort to contain his annoyance in public this week, and decided early on that firing someone over the matter would only give a win to his rivals and the media, the people said. None of his team offered to resign.
Still, even the president has voiced some exasperation at how the incident unfolded, which he felt reflected poorly on his administration. As the week progressed, he elected on multiple occasions to address the matter himself to reporters after aides struggled to establish a coherent explanation for what happened.
On Tuesday, he suggested a “lower level staffer” might have patched Goldberg through. “Sometimes people are hooked in, and you don’t know they’re hooked in,” he said, shrugging off the matter as an everyday technical snafu.
“I don’t know anything about Signal,” he made sure to explain. “I wasn’t involved in this.”
By Wednesday, he’d moved away from the unnamed “low-level staffer” and was talking openly about Waltz, who had taken responsibility the previous evening.
“It was Mike, I guess. I don’t know,” Trump said, again trying to distance himself from the entire affair.
After his aides spent the previous days defending use of Signal as an “approved” method of communicating sensitive information, Trump suggested they might rethink.
“It could be a defective platform,” he said, “and we’re going to have to find that out.”
Trump and his team have relied on a tested playbook of denying any grave wrongdoing, all while deflecting blame on Goldberg — and the media at large for covering the story.
“It’s all a witch-hunt,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday, using the same label he’s applied to all manner of critical stories about him over many years.
Yet for all of his dismissals of the incident, he hasn’t sounded quite as sanguine as some of his top officials about how everything transpired.
“Somebody in my group either screwed up or it’s a bad signal,” he told the “VINCE” podcast in a morning appearance Wednesday, still apparently a little hazy on the specifics of the app.
Some other officials who were included in the chat also did not sound entirely convinced the matter was something to underplay.
“Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you ain’t supposed to be on that thing,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was traveling in Jamaica as the scandal unfolded back home.
Rubio did not participate substantively in the chat, although he did not appear to voice objections in real time to the information that was being shared, according to screen shots that were published in The Atlantic.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was also on the chain, but never weighed in.
“One of the few advantages of being one of the older people in the Cabinet is I still like to pick up the phone and call people,” he said on Fox News, a big smile on his face.
Vice President JD Vance, who wrote in the chat he was concerned about the strike plans in part because he was “not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” suggested Friday the chats simply revealed Trump’s team was trying to get their messages straightened out.
“What that leak revealed, I think, was a private communication between the president’s senior advisers about how best to prepare the American people for what we all thought we’d have to do,” he said during a visit to Greenland.
Even before he accepted responsibility, most of the finger-pointing inside the White House has been directed toward Waltz, who the chat screenshots indicate added Goldberg to the group. Waltz was among the first to brief the president on the incident Monday, CNN previously reported.
Yet Waltz has also not been entirely forthcoming in public about how, precisely, it happened, suggesting in one interview that Goldberg may have been “sucked in” somehow to the conversation.
The National Security Council, the White House counsel’s office and Elon Musk — the billionaire Tesla founder tasked with reforming the federal government — were looking into the matter.
As of Friday, the results of their investigation hadn’t been announced, but Vance said an update should be coming “soon.”
Apparently less concerning to Trump was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s role, which included sending a minute-by-minute sequence of the attack to the chat before it happened, which many national security experts and defense officials said would have been highly classified.
“How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it,” Trump said when questioned about his Pentagon chief’s role.
‘Somebody has to go down for this’
Inside and outside Washington, Trump’s allies were unimpressed by the White House’s attempts to downplay the incident.
“I would hope somebody owns up to the fact there’s a major mistake and apologize and says it’ll never happen again. I would hope somebody would say that. That’s what adults do, responsible adults do,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday.
Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder who voted for Trump, was more blunt.
“Somebody has to go down for this,” he said in a self-described “rant” posted online.
On Thursday morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Republican chair and top Democrat formally requested an inquiry and assessment by the Pentagon’s acting inspector general into the incident.
Waltz, who gave up a Florida House seat to take on the White House role, retains Trump’s confidence, the president has said. Yet the closer-than-expected race to replace him in Congress – where the GOP already has a precariously narrow majority – has generated frustrations at the White House, and led to an intervention by Trump’s team.
A top adviser to Trump reached out directly to state Sen. Randy Fine, the Republican running to replace Waltz, with a message that he needed to get his house in order and get on the airwaves, a White House source told CNN.
Weeks later, Republicans are bracing for a closer-than-expected result Tuesday in Florida’s deep-red 6th Congressional District, where their nominee has been significantly outraised and is at risk of falling far short of the president’s November performance in the district.
Reflecting that concern, Trump called into a pair of tele-rallies Thursday evening to give a boost to Fine — and underscore the stakes.
“The whole country’s actually watching this one,” he said on the tele-rally. “It’s a very big one.”
