The Trump administration kept up its defiant stance over what it terms the “Signal hoax,” which began when a group of senior officials added a journalist to an encrypted chat.
“The mainstream media continues to be focused on a sensationalized story from the failing Atlantic magazine that is falling apart by the hour,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a lengthy opening statement at Wednesday’s White House press briefing.
Leavitt savaged the publication and its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was privy to a Signal chat involving Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, and others detailing a pending strike on the Houthis.
“Their release of these internal messages validates the truth, which we have been saying all along,” Leavitt said. “If this story proves anything, it proves that Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate, and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well.”
She reiterated that there were no war plans discussed on the chat, despite its inclusion of statements such as Hegseth’s “1415: Strike Drones on Target” detailing military plans.
However, Leavitt was repeatedly pressed on details of the story during a briefing that ended after less than 25 minutes.
Goldberg published a second story on the matter Wednesday morning with more details including the listing of specific times that strikes would happen after the Trump administration insisted that no war plans were shared. Nonetheless, Leavitt insisted that no war plans and no classified information were shared.
“We are not going to bend in the face of this insincere outrage,” she said, adding that Signal is an approved messaging app for the federal government to use. “We’re not going to lose focus of the bottom line, which is that Joe Biden’s weakness enabled and emboldened Houthi terrorists, and President Trump’s strength and resolve eliminated those terrorists.”
When pressed by a reporter on what the chat was about if it was not about war plans, Leavitt said it was a “policy discussion,” and referred back to her response when asked similar questions later on in the briefing.
“The president, as the commander in chief of our United States Armed Forces, and Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is an incredible man and a warfighter himself, take the lives of our American service members with the utmost responsibility,” Leavitt said, “and they would never do anything intentionally to put American lives at risk.”
Trump has bragged in the past about his willingness to fire subordinates, yet he is so far standing beside Waltz and Hegseth, which Leavitt reiterated during the news briefing.
Other reporters lobbed follow-up questions at the press secretary about Vance’s foreign policy views, what consequences Waltz and Hegseth would face, and whether classified information was shared.
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Her stance did not change throughout the briefing, leading her to end it after a shorter-than-usual interval of time.
“I have now been asked and answered the same question, using different language, multiple times,” she said when asked why Waltz was getting a “mulligan” after the story broke. “If anybody has another question, there’s a lot of different things going on in the world.”