“The administration is dealing with what happened,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Monday evening that White House national security adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegses should not face discipline in chats they had via a signal from an encrypted messaging app that allegedly includes plans to attack Yemeni terrorist groups.
“Of course not,” Johnson replied when asked if the two should face some kind of punishment.
“The administration, as I understand, I was just with the president of the Oval Office and now the administration is talking about what happened,” Johnson said in response to a question about Goldberg’s report.
Johnson also downplayed the importance of the incident.
“Apparently, an inadvertent phone number made it in that thread. They track it down and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
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The text chain on the signal “contained operational details of the upcoming strike on Yemen’s Iran-backed Hootefel, including information on targets, US deployed weapons and attack sequences,” Goldberg argued in the report. He wrote that the strike against Houthis began two hours after Goldberg received the details.
It was not immediately clear whether the details of military operations were classified, but often so. At the very least, they are kept safe to protect service members and operational security.
The US has been airstrikes against Houthis since extremist groups began targeting commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea in November 2023.
In response to the initial report released Monday, President Donald Trump told reporters he was unaware of the highly sensitive information being shared. He later spoke about the violation.
“Michael Waltz learned the lesson and he’s a good guy,” Trump told NBC News in a phone interview Tuesday morning. Waltz suggested he would not resign.
The National Security Council said in a statement it is investigating how journalist numbers have been added to the chain of signal group chats. In addition to Hegseth, the chat included Vice President of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Tarsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.
“No one was texting the war plan, and that’s all I have to say about it,” the Pentagon chief said, criticizing Goldberg’s work as a journalist.
Goldberg responded to Hegses’ statement in an interview with MSNBC on Monday, explaining what he saw in the group chat and said he was dissenting Hegses’ statement.
Goldberg later said that Hegzes’ comments in Hawaii were “unpleasant and deviated from the fact that he joined the conversation on an uncategorized commercial messaging app.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
