President Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Waltz, was pressed by Democrats on Capitol Hill on Tuesday but did not acknowledge any wrongdoing related to a sensitive group chat on the commercial messaging app Signal in March.
Mr. Waltz, during a hearing on his nomination to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, repeated the Trump administration’s defenses of the group chat where senior officials discussed sensitive details of a military operation in Yemen. He was ousted from his national security position following the revelation that he added a journalist to the group chat that included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other top officials.
Mr. Waltz told lawmakers that “there was no classified information on that chat,” and did not address why he added the journalist to the discussion on Signal.
It was the first time Mr. Waltz had appeared before Congress since he was removed from his post. Mr. Trump passed the national security adviser role to Mr. Rubio and nominated Mr. Waltz for the U.N. role in May.
Mr. Waltz echoed the Trump administration’s defense over the use of Signal, saying that the app was recommended by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration. In December, the agency directed “highly targeted individuals” in senior positions to use messaging apps with “end-to-end encryption, such as Signal” as a safer alternative to SMS text messaging.
But Democrats told Mr. Waltz that he and other top officials should have known better than to share war plans over a commercial messaging app, and pressed him to take responsibility for what Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, called an “amateur move.”
Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, echoed the criticism and added, “That’s not leadership, when you can’t say the words, ‘I made a mistake.’”
Mr. Waltz deflected when asked to confirm whether he was still on the White House payroll more than two months after he was removed as national security adviser. A White House document from July 1 listed his annual salary as $195,200.
“I was not fired, the president never said that, nor did the vice president,” he said. “I was kept on as an adviser transitioning a number of important activities.”
Mr. Waltz does not need the support of Democrats to land his next job. Executive branch nominees can be confirmed with a simple majority vote in the Senate.
His nomination hearing falls uncommonly late in the year, after Mr. Trump dropped his original nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York for the U.N. role, asking her to stay in Congress to shore up Republicans’ slim House majority.
Mr. Waltz committed to spearhead “major reform” at the U.N. Congressional Republicans argue that the United States contributes far more than other nations to the international body and that the U.N. has strayed from its core mandate to maintain international peace and security.
But Democrats warn that Mr. Trump’s push for sweeping cuts to the U.S. budget for the U.N. will have consequences.
“Put simply, we cannot shape these organizations, or even push for the reforms that we want, unless we are at the table,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.
Megan Mineiro is a Times congressional reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
The post Waltz, in U.N. Ambassador Hearing, Defends Signal Group Chat appeared first on New York Times.
