Courtesy of The Atlantic
Trump administration true believers are closing ranks to try to protect top national security officials from being pushed out over Monday’s Signal scandal, insiders tell Axios.
- Why it matters: Democrats and critics of President Trump want him to fire National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. That’s a major reason he could survive. So far, insiders are defiant.
Four top administration officials tell Axios they expect the controversy to die down and Waltz to remain. Four outside advisers concurred.
- “We don’t care what the media says,” a Trump adviser said. “We can easily handle what would kill any other administration. This will blow over.”
- A senior White House official added: “Trump certainly wasn’t pleased with this. But all this talk you see about Waltz not lasting is just way premature. There’s a Washington feeding frenzy. And we all know that you don’t give the mob what it wants.”
Still, there’s a debate in Trumpworld over whether Waltz will ultimately get sacked after accidentally adding Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to an 18-member Signal group chat, “Houthi PC small group” (for Principals Committee, the National Security Council’s top officials).
- Goldberg reports he was mistakenly sent messages that contained “war plans” for strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen: “The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”
The group chat, on the commercial messaging app Signal, included more than a dozen top Trump officials.
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Goldberg writes.
Screenshot: CNN
What we’re hearing: “The main thing Mike [Waltz] is definitely gonna get sh*t about is that it was The Atlantic. Man, the boss hates The Atlantic,” an outside adviser told Axios, laughing.
- “But seriously, this was horrible. Just really embarrassing.”
“Waltz is utterly humiliated by the whole thing. He probably wants to die,” said a longtime ally of Trump and Waltz, a former Florida congressman.
- “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike offered his resignation and if Trump refused it.”
- However, a ninth top Trump adviser told us Tuesday morning that they were “unsure” about Waltz’s fate.
Between the lines: Administration officials concede the episode was deeply embarrassing, and put top Trump Cabinet members in the blast radius of a humiliating story about a sloppy security failure.
- Waltz now has a bunch of top officials, and their teams, who are annoyed at him for drawing bad publicity.
Reality check: No one can say for sure how Trump will feel going forward. Trump could sour on Waltz if coverage of the blunder continues to saturate cable TV — especially if a small faction of outside advisers who dislike Waltz can get to the president.
- But Trump instinctively resists giving adversaries a win.
Behind the scenes: Goldberg writes that after he accepted the Signal connection request on March 11, he and Atlantic colleagues “discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization.”
- “I had very strong doubts that this text group was real,” he added.
Goldberg writes that after seeing Waltz on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, he concluded the Signal chain “was almost certainly real.”
- The editor says he removed himself from the Signal group, “understanding that this would trigger an automatic notification to the group’s creator, ‘Michael Waltz.'”
- Monday morning, Goldberg emailed top officials with questions about the thread. The NSC spokesman replied two hours later that the thread “appears to be authentic.”
Landing in Hawaii as he began an Indo-Pacific swing, Hegseth bashed Goldberg as a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called ‘journalist’ who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”
- Goldberg responded last night on CNN: “No, that’s a lie. He was texting war plans. He was texting attack plans.”
What’s next: Two members of the Signal chat — CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — are scheduled to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee at 10am ET.
- Both then face questions at House Intel tomorrow. Axios’ Hill crew reports Dems plan to focus heavily on the Signal debacle at both hearings.
