Posted on 03/28/2025 8:24:00 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
US President Donald Trump tells NBC News that he will not fire his National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, after the senior aide added a journalist to a sensitive chat on a messaging app in which information on US military operations was shared.
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” says Trump.
The president also blames one of Waltz’s staffers for adding The Atlantic chief editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group chat about US plan for strikes on the Houthis in Yemen.
The group, on the Signal messaging app, included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff and 12 other officials.
Waltz has been a firm and outspoken backer of Israel throughout his career. He is seen as an Iran hawk, and represents a traditional, muscular Republican foreign policy approach, as opposed to an emerging isolationist wing in the current administration.
Trump also tells NBC that the slip-up had “no impact at all” on military operations against the Houthis. He says he has confidence in his team, with this being “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.”
Trump and Waltz spoke yesterday, when Goldberg published the story, two officials tell NBC.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesofisrael.com ...
You can’t give the enemy a scalp, otherwise you’ll have a feeding frenzy on your hands. I’m still not certain how much of this “scandal” is Waltz’s fault and how much of the blame lies elsewhere. But even if it was all his fault, Trump is right to not give in to the left’s demands. He can always find some pretext to fire Waltz in a couple months, after things have blown over. But doing so now would only embolden the left.
This Neocon journalist with Israeli military experience comes off the Clintonista I sort of sense it. Clintons-Israel-Epstein.
Trying to head off the files at the pass.
Has Trump expressed similar confidence in Hegseth? He is urgently needed to get our military headed back in the right direction.
Yes he has
At a minimum, Waltz needs a new staff.
It seems to have been done by a Waltz staff person, so he ends up taking the hit. But so does Trump because it was an unforced error that made him look bad, and Donald Trump does not like to be humiliated by his own people.
Lesson learned, or damn well should be. We’re in a war and can’t afford stupid mistakes. As Elon says, “things will be checked twice, if not thrice”. There’s nothing wrong with Signal but they need a triple-redundancy check of every group chat from now on.
And the Trump Team needs to take a lesson in damage control from this. They were caught off guard and let the media drive the story instead of getting out in front of it and releasing the chat transcript first, along with details on the success of the operation and drive that point over and over. The real story should have been the successful mission not a pissing contest with CNN and federal judges over inside baseball chatter.
Fine. Just keep an eye on him
.
I think this is the right thing to do. It was a screw up that fortunately came without a cost, so count it as a lesson learned.
He should be fired...he’s Deep State. It was FAR MORE than a ‘mistake’. He should not have reporters on Speed Dial.
Waltz got the kiss of death.
There is a conversation that he has the most amount of Biden holdovers. And Alex Wong could be the person that put Goldberg on the list. Maybe he has to come up with his own people.
Agree
Ultimately, much ado about nothing.
I'll be more concerned about a potential mole in Trump Administration.
Waltz has some VERY IFFY PEOPLE FROM THE DEEP STATE WORKING FOR HIM! Hmmmmmmm
Waltz is a mole. Ex-Cheney guy. Get rid of him.
Tough to do in the NSC, as Trump presumably well learned in his first administration.
But his team is also committed to a “no scalps” unity against the Dems for whom this was surely an operation.
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