WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE SIGNAL MESS. The brouhaha over the group text involving top members of the Trump national security team is rapidly coming down to two questions: One, how did the participants in the group, which included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, national security adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and others somehow come to include the virulently anti-Trump journalist Jeffrey Goldberg? And two, did the running conversation, conducted on the commercially available encrypted app Signal, include classified information about the U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen on March 15?
Waltz, who created the group and is the focus of much discussion, did his first media interview Tuesday night with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. The first question, of course, was how Goldberg, a leading figure in the anti-Trump Resistance, got into a conversation that was supposedly limited to very senior administration officials.
Waltz conceded that the episode was embarrassing and said the White House has engaged Elon Musk, chief of the Department of Government Efficiency, and his experts to investigate how Goldberg’s number was included in the group text. Waltz said, “I can tell you for 100% I don’t know this guy [Goldberg],” Waltz said. “I know him by his horrible reputation, and he really is the bottom scum of journalists. … I don’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone, and we’re going to figure out how this happened.”
“So you don’t know what staffer was responsible for this?” Ingraham asked. Waltz did not answer the question and instead said that he, Waltz, built the group and takes full responsibility: “My job is to make sure everything is coordinated.” When Ingraham pressed, Waltz said, “Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there? 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 something we’re trying to figure out.”
Ingraham pressed again, “But how did it end up on your phone? That’s a pretty big problem.” Waltz answered, “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.” Waltz also said there was one person who was supposed to be a participant but who was not on the group text. “The person that I thought was on there was never on there,” he said. Questioned by Ingraham, Waltz declined to name that person.
So the news on question one was that Waltz said there was some sort of mix-up in which he or his staff had a contact with a mismatched name and number, he would not name any staff person who might have played a role in the matter, he did not name the intended group participant who never participated, and, finally, the investigation now includes Musk and his technical staff playing a key role.
On question two, the classified information question, the allegation stems from Goldberg’s assertion that Hegseth contributed a post that “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” Late Monday, in an interview on CNN, Goldberg said Hegseth “was texting war plans. He was texting attack plans, when targets were going to be targeted, how they were going to be targeted, who was at the targets, when the next sequence of attacks were happening.”
A little earlier on Monday, Hegseth said flatly, “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.” In the interview with Ingraham, Waltz said, more clearly than any other top administration official, that the text group exchanges did not include classified information. When Ingraham asked, “But there’s no classified information in this exchange?” Waltz nodded and said, “No classified information.” Waltz added that he would nevertheless prefer that the information remain secret.
Earlier Tuesday, two participants in the group text, Gabbard and Ratcliffe, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that they had not discussed or contributed classified information in the group text. But under questioning from Democrats, Ratcliffe speculated that Hegseth might have declassified the information: “The secretary of defense is the original classification authority, and my understanding is that his comments are that any information that he shared was not classified.”
Despite all the denials, what happened is still not clear to outsiders. Goldberg is a journalist who, when it comes to his attacks on President Donald Trump, has always operated on the edges of credibility; in recent years, he has become known, certainly in Republican circles, as the author of sensational, high-impact attacks on Trump that could not be verified. Trumpworld has good reason to hold him in low regard. On the other hand, if the group text contained anything resembling the information Goldberg claims, it is hard to see how it was not classified in the hours before the attack, when Hegseth apparently shared the information with the group. Like the how-was-Goldberg-included question, this one remains unclear.
So that is where things stand right now. At the moment, Republicans on Capitol Hill don’t seem terribly concerned about the story, believing it will fade quickly even as Democrats try to keep it alive. The GOP position is supported by two important facts: One, the Yemen operation was a complete success for the United States, and two, Trump has voiced strong support for his administration’s officials. That will help Republicans as they try to move on. But at the same time, at least so far, the things we know just don’t fully add up. There is more to learn.