President Donald Trump has responded to a new report from The Atlantic revealing the messages sent in a Signal group chat used to discuss the administration’s plans to strike Yemen.
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffery Goldberg, who was inadvertently added to the Signal chat group discussing sensitive military operations, published the messages on Wednesday after the White House and senior U.S. officials repeatedly claimed the chat did not contain classified information.
Trump claimed the leak wasn’t “a big deal” during a Wednesday appearance on The Vince Show podcast by Vince Coglianese.
“There weren’t details, and there was nothing in there that compromised,” Trump said. “And it had no impact on the attack, which was very successful.”
“A thing like that, maybe Goldberg found a way,” he added. “Maybe there’s a staffer, maybe there’s a very innocent staffer, but we’ll get, I think we’ll get to the bottom of it very quickly, and it’s really not a big deal.”
National Security Adviser Mike Waltz took full responsibility for the snafu on Tuesday night, telling Fox News’s Laura Ingraham that a staffer didn’t add Goldberg.
“Well, look, a staffer wasn’t responsible,” Waltz said. “Look, I take full responsibility. I built the group to make — my job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.”
He then went on to call Goldberg a “loser” who may have “deliberately” tricked someone in the administration into getting access to the chat.
The messages from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, sent on the day of the attack, March 15, contain a detailed timeline of when U.S. forces would strike Houthi targets in Yemen.
“Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME,” one of the messages Hegseth wrote that day said.
After the messages were published, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt issued another denial.
“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,’” she said in a post on X. “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”
Hegseth shared the plan approximately two hours before the bombs dropped in Yemen, The Atlantic reported. Some 53 people, including children, were killed in the attacks.
More to come…
