Trump unlikely to fire Waltz or others involved in Signal chat leak, officials say

Donald Trump is unlikely to fire Mike Waltz, or anyone else involved in the now-infamous sharing of military plans in a group chat, to avoid even a tacit admission of fault, according to two administration officials close to the president.

Trump repeated his public support for Waltz at the Oval Office on Wednesday, saying his national security adviser had taken responsibility for creating the group chat and for unintentionally adding the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg.

The officials said Trump rarely if ever admits mistakes, and has reportedly enjoyed the ferocious response of Waltz and other White House officials, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to critical reporting of the leak.

The president also defended Hegseth’s involvement. “He had nothing to do with this. Hegseth? How do you bring Hegseth into this?”

Hegseth sent the messages that sparked the classification concerns. The contradiction appears to underscore Trump’s personal determination to not hand the Atlantic a victory, a person familiar with the matter said, and indicates he will continue to characterize the leak of attack plans as minor and immaterial.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration’s attempts to defend the leak of sensitive military plans on grounds that they were not classified became harder to reconcile on Wednesday, after the Atlantic published the full text chain showing the level of detail of the attack plans.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, repeated that none of the messages were classified, while Hegseth and other officials made the semantic argument that the messages did not amount to a “war plan”, as they were originally characterized by the Atlantic, which later began using the term “attack plans”.

Former US officials said that technically speaking, a “war plan” would be more specific about the types and routings of weaponry, the coordinates of targets, contingency and backup options, and including a more thorough strategy discussion.

However, the information shared by Hegseth included a summary of operational details about the operation to strike Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, such as the launch times of F-18 fighter jets, the time that the first bombs were expected to drop, and the time that naval Tomahawk missiles would be launched.

The former US officials universally agreed that these military details were sensitive from a national security perspective because the information was shared before the attack began. Had it leaked, the targets could have escaped or otherwise compromised the mission.

The US Department of Defense’s own classification guidelines suggest the kind of detailed military plans in the Signal chat would typically be classified at least at the “secret” level, while some of the real-time updates could have risen to a higher level of classification.

The group chat also included a message from Waltz who shared a real-time update (“first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed”), which would have also ordinarily been classified at least at the “secret” level if it came from an asset operated by the intelligence community.