Signalgate Is Not as Complicated As the White House Wants Us to Think

On Tuesday night, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that “the best technical minds” were investigating how the top editor of The Atlantic got added to a Signal group chat in which Waltz and other Cabinet officials discussed plans for the March 15 bombing of Yemen.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” Waltz promised, and in so promising, became the living, breathing embodiment of the “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” meme.

The truth is that Signalgate is really not that complicated.

Anyone who has ever owned a smartphone can understand the sense of dread that comes from accidentally texting the wrong person or group. In a world of constant digital communication, the misfired text is an ever-present landmine. This, of course, is why the national security advisor, secretary of state, vice president, and all of the country’s top intelligence officials aren’t supposed to discuss the details of confidential military operations over text message—even on an encrypted messaging app like Signal.

But the Trump administration is working overtime to spin the mishap into something more nefarious. In his interview with Ingraham, Waltz acknowledged he was the one who added The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to the group but repeatedly implied that the veteran journalist may have, by some inexplicable means, made it happen. “I didn’t see this loser in the group,” Waltz said. “It looked like someone else. Now, whether he did it deliberately, or it happened in some other technical means is something we’re trying to figure out.”

Or, quite possibly, it’s neither of those options. Despite Waltz’s apparent bewilderment, there are any number of obvious ways Goldberg could have been added to the group.

Maybe, as Waltz told Ingraham, he really did save someone else’s name in his phone along with the wrong number—and that number just happened to belong to one of Washington’s best-known foreign affairs reporters and editors. Or maybe Waltz, who said he had never met Goldberg, is misremembering—to put it generously—and did, in fact, have Goldberg’s contact, which he mistakenly added to the group.

In either scenario, a quick scan of Waltz’s contact list would crack the case, and surely “the best technical minds” could occupy themselves elsewhere.

What is clear is that since The Atlantic broke the news about the Signal chat, the Trump administration has scrambled to get its spin straight. Even as a spokesperson for the National Security Council confirmed the authenticity of the chat on Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed “nobody was texting war plans” and dismissed the story as the work of a journalist “who peddles in garbage.”

Then, on Tuesday, President Donald Trump told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly that somebody who “worked for Mike Waltz at a lower level” had Goldberg’s number “and somehow this guy ended up on the call.” (New project for the best technical minds: Explain to the president what a text message is.) And yet, on Ingraham’s show, Waltz said unequivocally that “a staffer wasn’t responsible” and said he took “full responsibility” for the snafu.

The administration has sought to downplay the sensitivity of the Signal chat, insisting that none of the shared information was classified. But that messaging is at odds with the fact that the White House also tried to prevent The Atlantic from publishing the chats in full. “This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told The Atlantic. “So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release.”

On Wednesday, The Atlantic published the chats, along with screenshots, noting that given the administration’s insistence that Goldberg is lying, “people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.”

By the end of Waltz’s interview on Tuesday night, even Ingraham appeared dubious about his explanation. “If you’ve never talked to [Goldberg] before, how’s the number on your phone?” she asked. Other MAGA commentators, including Tomi Lahren, have similarly found the administration’s shifting explanations lacking. “Regarding this whole signal debacle, the administration really just needs to come out and explicitly say they F’d up,” Lahren wrote Tuesday on X. “The word gymnastics is making it worse.”

Ingraham also probed Waltz on why he was using Signal at all when a 2023 Department of Defense memo warned against it. That memo noted that “misuse and mismanagement of mobile apps poses a cybersecurity and operations security risk” and prohibited the use of Signal to discuss “non-public DoD information” without special authorization.

Waltz once again asserted that the situation is more complicated than it seems, saying that he would prefer if everyone could sit together in a “steel-lined lead room and have all of these conversations.” The Situation Room, of course, exists for this precise reason, and, as President Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton told CNN, when government officials can’t be there in person, they are able to call in through secure lines.

If anyone should know that, it’s the national security advisor, particularly one who got so worked up about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured server. But in his interview with Ingraham, Waltz chalked up the use of Signal as a necessary workaround in a fast-moving administration when senior officials are always on the road. Indeed, according to Wired, Waltz himself was traveling the night of the bombing—to a $1 million a head candlelit dinner for donors at Mar-a-Lago.