White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz couldn’t explain Tuesday how a reporter ended up in a sensitive Signal group chat he organized to discuss striking the Houthi militant group in Yemen, suggesting that the journalist, The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, could have somehow snuck in on purpose.
“It’s embarrassing, yes. We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” Waltz told Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who at times seemed skeptical of his responses during their lengthy discussion.
“I just talked to Elon on the way here. We have the best technical minds looking at how this happened,” Waltz said, before echoing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, another participant in the chat who on Monday trashed Goldberg.
“I can tell you for 100 percent: I don’t know this guy. I know him by his horrible reputation, and he really is the bottom scum of journalists. And I know him in the sense that he hates the president,” Waltz said. “But I don’t text him. He wasn’t on my phone. And we’re going to figure out how this happened.”
Goldberg, though, reported that it was Waltz who invited him into the Signal chat.
Ingraham then followed up with several specific questions about the incident, and Waltz, who acknowledged he was responsible for putting the chat together, nevertheless suggested that Goldberg somehow could have schemed his way into it:
Ingraham: So, you don’t know what staffer is responsible for this right now?
Waltz: Well look, a staffer wasn’t responsible, and I take full responsibility. I built the group. My job is to make sure everything is coordinated.
Ingraham: But how did that number—I don’t mean to be pedantic here, but how did that number get in the chat?
Waltz: Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number?
Ingraham [sarcastically]: Oh, I never make those mistakes.
Waltz: Right? You’ve got somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact, so of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else. Now whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is what we are trying to figure out.
Ingraham: So, a staffer did not put his contact information?
Waltz: No, no, no. Of course not.
Ingraham: But how did it get in the phone?
Waltz: That’s what we’re trying to figure out.
Ingraham: OK. But that’s a pretty big problem. If there are number—
Waltz: We have the best technical minds, right?
Ingraham: That’s disturbing.
Waltz: I mean, I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where it said one person and then a different phone number.
Ingraham: But you have never talked to him before, how is the number on your phone? I mean, I’m not an expert on any of this, but... how is the number on your phone?
Waltz: If you have somebody else’s contact and then somehow it gets sucked in—
Ingraham: If somebody sent that you contact—
Waltz: It gets sucked in.
Ingraham: Was there someone else who was supposed to be on the chat that wasn’t on the chat that you thought was on the chat?
Waltz: The person that I thought was on there was never on there. It was this guy.
When asked who Waltz believed Goldberg to be, he wouldn’t say.
“I take responsibility. I built the group,” said Waltz, whom White House aides have privately called a “f---king idiot” over the scandal, with some suggesting he should resign. “So that’s the part that we have to figure out.”
Notably, while Waltz denied knowing Goldberg personally, Goldberg wrote that the two have met before. Ingraham noted this discrepancy, asking Waltz, “So you’ve never met him?”
“No idea. Wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him—if I saw him in a police lineup,” he said. “I knew him by reputation by lying about the president over and over and over again. What I can tell you for certain: I certainly wasn’t reaching out or talking to him at all. Why would I?”
Ingraham concluded the interview by lamenting how the situation has given rise to a “conflicting set of facts.”
Trump, she also reminded Waltz, “needs no distractions.”
