'Tip of the iceberg': Can Trump's national security adviser survive Signal scandal?

David Catanese, McClatchy Washington Bureau on Mar 25, 2025

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WASHINGTON — National security adviser Mike Waltz expressed bewilderment Tuesday about how a prominent journalist was added to a text thread of high-level Trump administration officials a day after a report implicated him as the offender.

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, wrote that Waltz had connected with him earlier this month on Signal, a commercial messaging app, before being added to a group of national security officials who were convening electronically to discuss imminent strikes on the Houthis, a Yemen-based military movement.

While Goldberg said he had met Waltz in the past, the Trump adviser from Florida denied knowing Goldberg in comments delivered Tuesday at a White House meeting. Waltz said he “never met, don’t know,” and “never communicated with” the journalist, who broke the explosive story of Trump officials communicating about military plans on a non-secure app.

“We are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” Waltz said.

President Donald Trump expressed confidence in Waltz, calling him a good man who “learned a lesson,” and attacked Goldberg as a “sleazebag” who “has made up a lot of stories.”

“The only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one,” Trump told NBC News.

But a spokesman for the National Security Council already validated the authenticity of the text chain Goldberg published, which included 18 individuals, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and an unnamed active U.S. intelligence officer.

The messages included intelligence operations, a policy debate around the timing of the strikes against the Houthis and operational details, including information on targets, weapons and the sequencing of attacks.

Now, Waltz, who represented northeast Florida in Congress, is at the center of mounting questions about a seismic intelligence failure that placed secret pending military operations at risk and might have exposed highly sensitive information to foreign intelligence adversaries.

“If the world’s hostile intelligence services, and even some friendly ones, were to go after one single Signal chain, this would be it,” said Ned Price, a former State Department spokesman and National Security Council staffer.

The White House maintains that no war plans were discussed and no classified material was placed in the thread, but Goldberg withheld publishing some of the details he was exposed to because he believed some of the information conveyed could be “used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.”

John Bolton, national security adviser in Trump’s first term, said his brain fails when he tries to think about why top officials would communicate this way. Bolton said during his tenure he was never more than a few feet away from a secure government phone or a SCIF, referring to a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility where government officials review classified information.

Nonetheless, he predicted Trump would not move to fire anyone unless he noticed political damage to himself.

“I don’t think Trump will take any more definitive action against anybody unless it looks like he’s going to start taking heat for it. If his political fortunes begin to come into question, then I think he will look to find somebody to blame for it,” Bolton told The Miami Herald.

At the moment, only Democrats have called for Waltz’s resignation, along with Hegseth’s.

“When the stakes are this high, incompetence is not an option. Pete Hegseth should resign. Mike Waltz should resign,” posted Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia lambasted CIA Director John Ratcliffe during a hearing Tuesday for downplaying the gravity of the leaked Signal chat.

“This is an embarassment. This is utterly unprofessional. There’s been no apology, there has been no recognition of the gravity of this error,” Ossoff said.

South Florida GOP Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar defended Waltz as a patriot, posting: “Let the first person who has never made a mistake cast the first stone.”

Price agreed with Bolton, expressing skepticism that Waltz would lose his job over the blunder, even if the White House determines the national security adviser was responsible for exposing the chat to an unfriendly journalist.

What may ultimately determine Waltz’s fate is how much he used Signal to conduct national security policy.

“How many other Signal chains are out there? Is there a China XYZ Signal chat? Is there a Russia ABC Signal chat? Is this the tip of the iceberg? That’s the worst-case scenario, that they’ve routinely been using a commercial application to discuss our nation’s most guarded secrets,” said Price.

“If this is sort of a first drip of a leaky faucet, maybe Trump throws someone overboard,” he added. “”There’s no way to clean up the damage. There is a way to clean up the fallout. Do I think they will actually do that? No, I don’t. Far from it.”

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