Trump adviser Waltz claims ‘full responsibility’ for adding journalist to Signal group but can’t explain how it happened – as it happened | Trump administration

In an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox, Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, insisted that he does not know and has never texted with Jeffrey Goldberg, the well-connected Atlantic editor who was added to his Signal group chat to discuss strikes on Yemen.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” Waltz said, of how, exactly, Goldberg was added to the Signal group created on his phone. “I just talked to Elon on the way here,” Waltz added, referring to the president’s most senior adviser, Elon Musk. “We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.”

Despite that suggestion that there was some sort of technical glitch behind the accidental leak of secret defense information, Waltz then offered a much simpler explanation. “Have you ever had somebody’s contact, that shows their name, and then you have somebody else’s number there?” he asked.

Waltz said that he had intended to add someone else to the caht, and thought that he had done so, but mistakenly had Goldberg’s number under that other person’s name in his phone contacts.

That explanation, however – that Waltz had a contact for someone else in his phone to which he, or an aide, had mistakenly added Goldberg’s number – seems to contradict the national security adviser’s repeated claims, in the same interview, that he does not know Goldberg. “I don’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone and we’re going to figure out how this happened,” Waltz assured Ingraham.

Although Trump told NBC News earlier in the day that an aide to Waltz was responsible for putting Goldberg’s number on the phone, Waltz himself told Ingraham that no one on his staff was to blame.

“Well, look, a staffer wasn’t responsible, and I take full responsibility, I built the group.”