WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said his administration was investigating the addition of a journalist to a text group of top officials discussing plans for military strikes in Yemen, but expressed support for national security adviser Michael Waltz.

Yet even as Trump announced the inquiry Tuesday, he suggested procedures might not change in the aftermath of the incident.

“We look at everything,” Trump said, adding that his team would examine “if people are able to break into a system.”

“I always say you have to learn from every experience,” he added.

But, Trump said, he did not believe that the disclosures demanded a criminal investigation — or even necessarily a directive banning the use of Signal, the encrypted messaging chat app used by the officials, despite concerns over security and record-retention laws.

The president’s comments fit with a broader effort by the administration to downplay the stunning breach, which created a firestorm in Washington over the Trump team’s handling of sensitive information.

“I don’t know anything about Signal,” Trump said. “I wasn’t involved in this, but I just heard about it, and I hear it’s used by a lot of groups — it’s used by the media, a lot. It’s used by a lot of the military. And I think successfully, but sometimes somebody can get onto those things.”

‘We made a mistake’

Waltz, who has come under intense scrutiny for his role in the disclosure, said that security experts and legal officials were reviewing the incident.

“A staffer wasn’t responsible. And look, I take full responsibility,” Waltz said in a Fox News interview with conservative host Laura Ingraham, adding he created the group chat and “my job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.”

Waltz said he had spoken earlier in the day with Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc. CEO and billionaire Trump adviser, adding “we’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.”

“We made a mistake. We’re moving forward,” Waltz said.

The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg recounted the incident in a story published Monday. The text group, which also included Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others, discussed details of plans for an attack on Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Goldberg did not publish the actual plans in the article but wrote that Hegseth at one point shared “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen,” including targeting information and weapons specifications. The Trump team shared the plans on the encrypted messaging app Signal, which has a reputation for tight security but has not been authorized by the U.S. government as a platform to disseminate classified information.

Waltz in the Fox News interview struggled to explain how Goldberg was added to the group chat and said he didn’t know the journalist. He repeated the claim that no classified material was included in the chat, though when asked said he would object to the magazine releasing the rest of the information it had.

“I don’t want it all out there, because these were conversations back and forth that you should be able to have confidentially,” Waltz said.

Signal usage

At a Senate hearing Tuesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe described the use of Signal as permissible for intelligence officials. He and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom were on the text chain, defended their participation and reiterated that no classified information was shared.

Gabbard said the National Security Council was “reviewing all aspects of how this came to be, how the journalist was inadvertently added to the group chat and what occurred across the board.”

Trump was asked directly why that material wouldn’t be considered classified, and moved on without answering. But at a different point, Trump declined to commit to releasing the contents of the chain, saying he would ask “the military about that, because, you know, maybe you wouldn’t want that.”

The president asserted that he took Goldberg’s decision to ultimately depart the group chat as evidence that the editor “found it very boring.”

At the same time, Trump acknowledged officials had basically figured out how Goldberg was added to the chat, suggesting an internal investigation had already yielded an explanation. In an interview earlier Tuesday with NBC News, Trump suggested that one of Waltz’s aides was responsible.

“It was one of Michael’s people on the phone,” Trump said. “A staffer had his number on there.”

And at times Trump seemed to acknowledge the need for heightened security around sensitive information, saying that receiving briefings in the White House Situation Room with “no phones on” is “always the best, frankly.”

“Just last week I was in the Situation Room with something very important, and we had a couple of people hooked up by line and I said, ‘cancel the line. Sorry, fellas,’” Trump said.

Democrats at the previously scheduled Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global security threats where Ratcliffe and Gabbard spoke were unconvinced, calling the incident a massive national security breach. Some vowed to get the full text exchange.

“If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired,” said Sen. Mark Warner, the panel’s top Democrat. “This is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly towards classified information. This is not a one-off or a first-time error.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt earlier Tuesday said that the “White House Counsel’s Office has provided guidance on a number of different platforms for President Trump’s top officials to communicate as safely and efficiently as possible.”

Goldberg said in a CNN interview Monday night that the group was “texting attack plans. When targets were going to be targeted, how they were going to be targeted, who was at the targets. When the next sequence of attacks were happening.”

“They were plans for the attack, and they were texted before the attack,” Goldberg said.

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(With assistance from Natalia Drozdiak.)

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