Topics: Donald Trump, News, Politics, US News, Technology, World News
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz - who was responsible for the alarming security breach in a Signal group chat this week - has explained how it all happened.
On Tuesday (25 March) The Atlantic's editor-in-chief,Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had been accidentally invited into a Signal group chat, with over a dozen senior Trump administration officials including Vice President JD Vance, the secretary of state Marco Rubio, secretary of defence Pete Hegseth, and several others.
Goldberg said he received the Signal - an open-source encrypted messaging service - invitation to 'Houthi PC small group' from Waltz, who was also in the group chat.
The material in the text chain 'contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing', Goldberg reported.
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After the messages were leaked in an Atlantic report published on Tuesday, The White House confirmed the leak, with national security council spokesperson Brian Hughes telling the Guardian: "This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain."
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said: "I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time."
Trump also added that The Atlantic was 'not much of a magazine' and although he seemed to brush it off, he later stood by his national security advisor, telling NBC News: "Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man."
While the news of the breach pretty much broke the internet on Tuesday, Waltz has now spoken out and revealed how the leak happened.
“Look, I take full responsibility,” Waltz said to Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Tuesday evening.
“I built the group. My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.”
Suggesting a possible reason how it happened, Waltz added: “Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there?
“So, of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else.
“Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened by some other technical means is something we’re trying to figure out.”
Waltz explained he had also enlisted the help of Elon Musk to help understand what had happened.
“I just talked to Elon on the way here. We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.
“But I can tell you for 100 percent — I don’t know this guy. I know him by his horrible reputation. And he really is the bottom scum of journalists."
