The White House’s Security Fails Just Keep Piling Up

You’d think a solid grasp of basic security protocols would be a given for any White House national security advisor. But Michael Waltz could apparently use some practice.

On Wednesday, as the White House scrambled to explain how Waltz added the editor of The Atlantic to a Signal group chat about confidential plans to bomb Yemen, Wired discovered yet another digital security fail potentially implicating Waltz: The national security advisor appears to have left his entire 328-person friend list on Venmo exposed to the public.

According to Wired’s reporting, the Venmo account in question used the name “Michael Waltz,” bore a photo of Waltz, and was linked to Venmo accounts that appeared to belong to other White House officials, including Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Walker Barrett, a staffer on the National Security Council. The account apparently linked to Wiles also reportedly featured a public friend list including names like Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Hope Hicks, former White House communications director.

Even more telling, after Wired asked the White House about the Waltz and Wiles accounts, both accounts made their friend lists private.

Intelligence experts and security researchers have long warned that this kind of information can help would-be attackers glean valuable information about their targets and find contacts they may be able to manipulate or imitate. Venmo friend lists could also, say, expose the relationship between a journalist and a source. Since Signalgate broke open, Waltz has denied ever meeting The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg and has expressed bafflement at how Goldberg’s number ended up in his phone. Goldberg, meanwhile, has said they’ve met in the past, and photos suggest they’ve at least rubbed elbows at the same Washington event.

Goldberg doesn’t appear to have been among Waltz’s Venmo friends—at least Wired didn’t mention it. But other accounts appearing to belong to prominent media figures, including CNN’s Brianna Keilar and Kristen Holmes, as well as Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade of Fox News, were.

Waltz and Wiles can hardly say they weren’t warned about the risks of leaving their friend lists open. In 2021, Buzzfeed used Venmo’s friend feature to identify former president Joe Biden’s account and map his network of contacts. After that story published, Venmo created a tool enabling people to make their friend lists private. A Venmo spokesperson told Wired that the company makes it “incredibly simple for customers to make these private if they choose to do so.”

But some high-profile figures still didn’t get the memo. Last year, Wired also found the friend list for the account associated with Vice President J.D. Vance, exposing his connections to some of the people behind Project 2025.

While President Trump appears to be standing by Waltz and other top U.S. officials involved in the Signalgate scandal, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the debacle isn’t playing well in the court of public opinion. A YouGov poll found that 74% of voters consider the security lapse a very serious or somewhat serious problem. That includes 60% of Republicans. And some of the Trump administration’s biggest boosters are now openly calling for consequences. On Wednesday, Barstool Sports owner Dave Portnoy criticized the administration’s attempts to “poo poo” the story. “You can’t downplay it. You have to sit up there and be like, ‘Holy shit. This is a fuck up of epic proportions. There will be accountability,’” Portnoy said in a video posted on X. “Somebody has to go down.”