{"id":940,"date":"2025-03-27T16:04:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-27T16:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2025\/03\/27\/trump-unlikely-to-fire-waltz-or-others-involved-in-signal-chat-leak-officials-say-the-guardian-us\/"},"modified":"2025-03-27T16:04:00","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T16:04:00","slug":"trump-unlikely-to-fire-waltz-or-others-involved-in-signal-chat-leak-officials-say-the-guardian-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/2025\/03\/27\/trump-unlikely-to-fire-waltz-or-others-involved-in-signal-chat-leak-officials-say-the-guardian-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump unlikely to fire Waltz or others involved in Signal chat leak, officials say – The Guardian US"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Donald Trump<\/a> is unlikely to fire his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, or anyone else involved in the now infamous Signal group chat because doing so would be a tacit admission of fault and seen as handing victory to the Atlantic, according to two officials close to the president.<\/p>\n

Trump repeated his public support for Waltz at the Oval Office on Wednesday, saying his national security adviser had taken responsibility for creating the group chat and for unintentionally adding the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg.<\/p>\n

The officials said Trump rarely if ever admits mistakes, and has reportedly enjoyed the ferocious response of Waltz and other White House officials, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth<\/a>, to critical reporting of the leak.<\/p>\n

<\/gu-island><\/figure>\n

The president also defended Hegseth\u2019s involvement. \u201cHe had nothing to do with this. Hegseth? How do you bring Hegseth into this?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hegseth sent the messages that sparked the classification concerns. The contradiction appears to underscore Trump\u2019s personal determination to not hand the Atlantic a \u201cscalp\u201d, a person familiar with the matter said, and indicates he will continue to characterize the leak of attack plans as minor and immaterial.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the Trump administration\u2019s attempts to defend the leak of sensitive military plans on grounds that they were not classified became harder to reconcile on Wednesday, after the Atlantic published the full text chain showing the level of detail of the attack plans.<\/p>\n

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, repeated that none of the messages were classified, while Hegseth and other officials made the semantic argument that the messages did not amount to a \u201cwar plan\u201d, as they were originally characterized by the Atlantic, which later began using the term \u201cattack plans\u201d.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A screenshot of a text sent by a user named Pete Hegseth about timings for strike launches<\/a>
<\/svg><\/span>Screenshot shared by the Atlantic of Pete Hegseth\u2019s chats regarding strikes on Yemen in a Signal group.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

<\/gu-island><\/p>\n

Former US officials said that technically speaking, a \u201cwar plan\u201d would be more specific about the types and routings of weaponry, the coordinates of targets, contingency and backup options, and including a more thorough strategy discussion.<\/p>\n

However, the information shared by Hegseth included a summary of operational details about the operation to strike Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, such as the launch times of F-18 fighter jets, the time that the first bombs were expected to drop, and the time that naval Tomahawk missiles would be launched.<\/p>\n

The former US officials universally agreed that these military details were sensitive from a national security perspective because the information was shared before the attack began. Had it leaked, the targets could have escaped or otherwise compromised the mission.<\/p>\n

The US Department of Defense\u2019s own classification guidelines suggest the kind of detailed military plans in the Signal chat would typically be classified at least at the \u201csecret\u201d level, while some of the real-time updates could have risen to a higher level of classification.<\/p>\n

The group chat also included a message from Waltz who shared a real-time update (\u201cfirst target \u2013 their top missile guy \u2013 we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend\u2019s building and it\u2019s now collapsed\u201d), which would have also ordinarily been classified at least at the \u201csecret\u201d level if it came from an asset operated by the intelligence community.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump is unlikely to fire his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, or anyone else involved in the now infamous Signal group chat because doing so would be a tacit admission of fault and seen as handing victory to the Atlantic, according to two officials close to the president. Trump repeated his public support for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":941,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpinitiate.com\/echo-test\/demo973e36f5\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}