Waltz Created Other Signal Chats for National Security Conversations — Still on ‘Shaky Ground’ With Trump: Reports

Pool via AP

The leaked Signal chat that kept National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s name in headlines all last week was not the first time he used the messaging app to conduct conversations about sensitive topics, according to new reporting — and he remains on “shaky ground” with President Donald Trump as the backlash continues to fester.

Last week, Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg published an article detailing how Waltz had accidentally added him in a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal that included top level Trump administration national security agency officials, as they discussed attack plans and messaging strategies related to striking the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this month. The chat included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and other intelligence agency and White House officials.

Waltz initially attempted to deny knowing Goldberg and claimed to not know how the journalist’s number was in his phone, but it didn’t take long for a photo to resurface showing the two attending film screening event at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. that Goldberg moderated. Goldberg himself shot down Waltz’s claims they hadn’t spoken in a Sunday appearance on Meet the Press as”simply not true.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, Waltz is “still navigating a minefield” from the scandal’s fallout, with Trump having decided “for now” not to fire him, but viewing Waltz’s reputation as damaged and his future in the administration still on “shaky ground.”

Somewhat predictably for a president who has centered a significant amount of his messaging on his battles, real or exaggerated, with the “fake news,” a key factor in Trump’s ire with Waltz was not that he set up the Signal chat or posted information on an unclassified system, but that he had Goldberg’s number in his contacts in the first place.

The WSJ report includes accounts of Trump’s “anger” in “many private discussions” with his inner circle last week where he “unloaded expletives and blamed Waltz for the administration’s first big national-security crisis,” including chats with Vance, Wiles, and personnel chief Sergio Gor as he considered whether or not to ditch Waltz.

So far, Trump’s decision to let Waltz stay in his position rests on his reluctance to “admit wrongdoing” and let Democrats and media “claim a scalp so early in his second administration,” multiple sources close to Trump told the WSJ. One source said if the Signal chat had been reported first by a MAGA-friendly outlet like Breitbart, Waltz would not have gotten any reprieve.

Politico offered additional reporting Monday morning that Waltz’s screw up sparked “simmering anger” directed his way from White House advisers and Trump’s discussions with Vance, Wiles, and Gor initially had them suggesting to the president that he consider firing Waltz, “but Trump ultimately decided not to fire him for one reason — for now: Like hell he’d give the liberal media and pearl-clutching Democrats a win.”

Waltz still has his job, and publicly the administration was standing by him, but “[t]hat doesn’t mean he’s safe yet,” two sources told Politico, and the White House is “just waiting for the right time to let him go, eager to be free of the newscycle before making changes,” with the axe expected to fall “in a couple of weeks.”

Trump administration officials grew “more perturbed” after the photo of Goldberg standing next to Waltz at the film screening event resurfaced and were “equally irate” about another report about Waltz leaving his Venmo contacts public and the list including a number of mainstream media journalists.

As often happens with political scandals, the knives are out behind the scenes. Politico’s report has sources accusing Waltz of acting “too big for his britches” and irritatingly “linger[ing] around Trump too often and appear[ing] to put on airs.” The WSJ report describes how “many” of Waltz’s colleagues were “annoyed” with him for “seeming imperious and expressing views that were out of line with Trump’s agenda” and betrayed Trump’s voter base:

Waltz’s ideological adversaries are pursuing an internal campaign to remind the president that Waltz wasn’t always aligned with him, by pointing out that Waltz opposed the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and Syria, supported America’s defense of Ukraine, and worked on national security legislation with then-Rep. Liz Cheney, a House Republican from Wyoming who opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Some administration officials also began circulating clips on Friday of Waltz making particularly critical comments of Trump in the past. One was a 2016 video of Waltz criticizing Trump for not serving in the Vietnam War and urging voters to “stop Trump now.”

“All this has reminded everybody of those facts,” said a senior administration official, “and those were things that were best conveniently forgotten.”

What was really “infuriating” to top White House officials, reported Politico, was that Waltz was viewed as refusing to take responsibility, offering the nonsensical and unbelievable claim that Goldberg somehow hacked the Signal chat, and otherwise “prolonging the scandal.” One particular gripe was that Waltz did not offer to resign. “When you’re a staffer and you become a liability or distraction for your principal, you fucking resign — I don’t care what the situation is,” one source told Politico.

More gossipy chatter in the Politico report centered on Waltz’s relationship with Wiles having “soured” after he tried to exclude his fellow Floridian from top-level NSC meetings and failed to “treat her with the kind of respect that he should be treating a chief of staff,” with one source predicting this would ultimately be Waltz’s downfall. “He was probably going to be gone at some point anyway,” said the source. “So he probably will be gone, but they just don’t want to make it about this.”

The closer-than-expected special election to fill Waltz’s congressional seat in Florida seems to be exacerbating tensions; Trump made a rare admission of vulnerability last week when he pulled Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) nomination for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations to protect House Republicans’ razor-thin majority.

Another salient issue was that this was not the first time Waltz had used Signal in this way, reported the WSJ: “Two U.S. officials also said that Waltz has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members, including separate threads on how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine as well as military operations. They declined to address if any classified information was posted in those chats.”