House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Monday evening that White House national security adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should not face discipline over a chat they had over the encrypted messaging app Signal that allegedly included plans to strike a Yemeni terrorist group.
“Of course not,” Johnson responded when asked about whether the two should face punishment of some kind.
“The administration, as I understand, I just was with the president in the Oval Office, just now, the administration is addressing what happened,” Johnson said in response to a question about Goldberg’s report.
Johnson also downplayed the significance of the incident.
“Apparently, an inadvertent phone number made it onto that thread. They’re going to track that down and make sure that doesn’t happen again,” he said.
The text chain on Signal “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Goldberg claimed in his report. Strikes against the Houthis started two hours after Goldberg received the details, he wrote.
It was not immediately clear whether the specifics of the military operation were classified, though they often are. At the least, they are kept secure to protect service members and operational security.
The United States has conducted airstrikes against the Houthis since the militant group began targeting commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea in November 2023.
In response to the initial reports published on Monday, President Donald Trump told reporters he was not aware that the highly sensitive information had been shared. He later talked about the breach.
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump told NBC News in a phone interview on Tuesday morning, suggesting Waltz won’t be stepping down.
The National Security Council said in a statement that it was investigating how a journalist’s number was added to the chain in the Signal group chat. In addition to Hegseth, the chat included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence.
“Nobody was texting war plans and that’s all I have to say about that,” the Pentagon chief said, while criticizing Goldberg’s work as a journalist.
Goldberg responded to Hegseth’s statement during an MSNBC interview on Monday, saying that he was describing what he saw in the group chat and disputed Hegseth’s statement.
Goldberg later said that Hegseth’s remarks in Hawaii appear to be “unserious and trying to deflect from the fact that he participated in a conversation on an unclassified commercial messaging app.”
