Democrats were in faux outrage mode in the wake of a report by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that he was mistakenly included in a chat on Signal with senior Trump administration officials discussing a planned military strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen. Goldberg described the chat as containing “classified” information; however, that is untrue.
So while this wasn’t the scandal that Democrats hoped it would be, the big question that remains is how Goldberg ended up in the chat on Signal in the first place.
According to President Trump, they know that it was a staffer of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.
When asked what he was told about how Goldberg came to be added to the Signal chat, Trump said, “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”
Trump said Goldberg’s presence in the chat had “no impact at all” on the military operation.
The president expressed confidence in his team, saying he was not frustrated by the events leading up to The Atlantic’s story. The situation, Trump said, was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.”
The Atlantic’s story sent shockwaves across Washington on Monday. Democratic lawmakers demanded answers from the White House in multiple letters, with one from a group of Senate Democrats calling the situation “an astonishingly cavalier approach to national security.”
Top Democrats on the House Armed Services, Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees wrote a separate letter, pushing for answers about other instances in which senior officials discussed national security issues “using the Signal messaging service or any other messaging service application that has not been approved for the transmission of classified information.”
The Democrats’ talking points on this story quickly unraveled, however. As PJ Media previously reported, CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed on Tuesday that the Biden administration installed the Signal messaging app on CIA computers and approved it for official government use.
Related: Here’s What the Media Won’t Tell You About the Atlantic Hit Piece
“So that we’re clear, one of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at, uh, the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers,” Ratcliffe said in sworn testimony Tuesday. “Um, one of the things that I was briefed on very early, Senator, was by the CIA records management folks about—about the use of Signal as a permissible work use. It is. That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.”
Why would one of Waltz’s staffers have Goldberg in their contacts? Given Goldberg’s long history of pushing false narratives to undermine Trump, I’m finding it hard to believe that Goldberg would be on anyone’s list of journalists to leak information to.
Does the Trump administration know specifically which staffer it was, and does it know if the inclusion of Goldberg in the chat was really an “accident” or if it was deliberate? Maybe I’m being paranoid, but this feels like a setup. Hopefully we’ll get to the bottom of this soon.
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