President Trump put his national security adviser Mike Waltz on the spot, blaming him for the Signal leak that has led to criticism of the president's national security team.
"It was Mike, I guess. I don’t know, I always thought it was Mike," Trump told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.
Still, Trump maintained that the controversy over the leaked chats is a "witch hunt" and he offered no indication he wants Waltz to resign.
Trump's latest comments mark a shift in tone after he fulsomely defended Waltz and blamed a staffer for the situation. Waltz has taken responsibility for accidentally adding a liberal journalist to a Signal chat about military strikes in Yemen.
The chat group included Waltz, Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other top officials. Also included was Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the anti-Trump magazine The Atlantic.
Democrats have demanded that Waltz and Hegseth resign, but Trump and his top allies have said the criticism of the leak is overblown, pointing to the success of the mission against Houthi rebels.
“How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do — look, look, it’s all a witch hunt,” Trump said Wednesday.
The leak has placed Waltz's relationship with Goldberg under scrutiny. Golberg has played a significant role in spreading anti-Trump narratives, such as the sticky claim that Trump called soldiers "suckers and losers," which continued to dog Trump in 2024, four years after Goldberg first shared it.
A photo that resurfaced this week shows Waltz and Goldberg at the same event at the French Embassy in 2021. But Waltz has said he never met Goldberg, suggesting the "loser" journalist somehow broke into the chat.
“I know him by his horrible reputation, and he really is the bottom scum of journalists. And I know him in the sense that he hates the president, but I don’t text him. He wasn’t on my phone. And we’re going to figure out how this happened," Waltz told Fox News' Laura Ingraham.
According to reports, Trump is angry that Waltz had Goldberg in his phone, but the president is reluctant to fire Waltz and hand a victory to The Atlantic, which publishes articles attacking the president on a daily basis.
Trump defended Waltz as a "very good man" and called Goldberg a "total sleazebag" when asked about the Signal leak Tuesday.
