US President Donald Trump has said he has no beef with his national security adviser Mike Volz after the latter allegedly accidentally added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a secure group chat room where planned military strikes were discussed.
“Mike Volz has drawn conclusions. He’s a good man,” Trump said in a phone comment to NBC News when asked if he still has confidence in his adviser.
The president explained that the reporter’s number got into the chat room because of a mistake by a junior staffer. “It was one of Mike’s people, the staffer had the number on the list,” he said.
The National Security Council confirmed the group’s authenticity to Signal and said it was “verifying how someone else’s number got on the list.”
However, US Defence Secretary Pete Hagseth stressed that no one in US President Donald Trump’s administration “sent text messages about military plans” on messenger Signal.
Hagseth called The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg ” a lying and extremely discredited so-called journalist”.
A day earlier, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, described how President Donald Trump’s national security team included him in a secret chat room where strikes against Yemen’s Houthis were discussed. He said the discussion took place on the messenger Signal, which allows the exchange of encrypted messages. The chat included Trump’s national security adviser Mike Walz (he was the one who sent Goldberg the invitation), Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defence Pete Hagset and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The chat was called the Houthi PC small group (“small group versus Houthi”). In it, Goldberg writes, a user named Pete Hagseth posted data “about upcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would deploy, and the sequence of attacks.”
The journalist appeared in the chatroom under the initials JG. He suggests that he was added by mistake instead of some other senior White House official with the same initials.
At first, Jeffrey Goldberg did not take the correspondence seriously, but when the chat room began to receive messages, Goldberg realised that “the conversation had a high level of plausibility”.