National Security Adviser Mike Waltz doesn’t recall ever meeting The Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg. But the internet does.
Waltz, who has reportedly been called a “f---ing idiot” in the White House this week for inadvertently adding Goldberg to a top-secret group chat of national security officials, swore in a Fox News interview on Tuesday that he had no idea who the prominent journalist was.
“I can tell you for 100 percent: I don’t know this guy… Wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, if I saw him in a police lineup,” he told Laura Ingraham. “I certainly wasn’t reaching out or talking to him at all… I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else.”
But Goldberg, who backed the Trump administration into a corner on Wednesday by publishing the full transcript of messages exchanged by top officials about a military strike in Yemen, does recall meeting Waltz—twice.
“I’ve met him, I think, twice in my life. Not recently, probably; like a couple of years ago,” he told The Bulwark podcast. “But it didn’t strike me as a crazy thing. He’s the national security adviser. I’m the editor of a magazine. I write about national security. We probably agree on a lot of stuff, too.”
Though the two men provide conflicting accounts, a years-old photo could help set the record straight.
In 2021, renowned public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy posted a photo of him speaking to a crowd during the launch of his book and documentary The Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope, which probed humanitarian crises across the world during the pandemic.
The photo shows Waltz smiling up at the French philosopher speaking from the podium. Right behind the national security adviser was Goldberg, standing with his hand in his pocket.
Lévy also tagged both Waltz and Goldberg in an X post thanking everyone who came to the launch. A day before the event, Lévy sat down with Goldberg for a conversation about the documentary.
Years later, when it was announced that President Donald Trump had named Waltz his national security adviser, Lévy wrote on X: “Whatever you think of Trump, this nomination is good news.”
When asked earlier this week by Fox News host Laura Ingraham how he could have accidentally added Goldberg to the chat, Waltz conceded that he was the one responsible—but suggested either a technical problem or outright hacking on Goldberg’s part for the stunning breach.
He added that tech mogul Elon Musk and “the best technical minds” in the administration were working to figure out how Goldberg’s phone number ended up in his device—allegedly without his knowledge.
But not even Ingraham, apparently, could buy the excuse that Goldberg’s number magically wormed its way into Waltz’s phone.
“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number?” Waltz said, prompting the Fox News host to respond sarcastically: “Oh, I never make those mistakes.”
Trump was reportedly “pissed” about his adviser’s gaffe behind the scenes, but has nonetheless tasked Waltz with investigating his own mistake.
