Trump’s allies are working overtime to downplay top administration officials accidentally looping a journalist into a chat about airstrikes

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-ranking figures in Donald Trump’s administration recently used an unsecured Signal group chat to discuss plans to bomb Houthi militants in Yemen. The group chat somehow included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, who wrote about the experience on Monday.

The administration’s stunning carelessness with this kind of highly sensitive information would have, in normal times, led to resignations. These are not normal times, though, and the White House and its allies in Congress and throughout conservative media are once again digging in to defend something that is plainly indefensible.

Here are some of the absurd excuses that have been offered since Goldberg published the story on Monday.

I do not know of what you speak

Trump was asked about the breach on Monday, and pleaded ignorance. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine, but I know nothing about it.”

Trump certainly heard about it later, though, and multiple outlets reported that the White House discussed whether to make Waltz the fall guy and force his resignation. The president said on Tuesday that this won’t be happening. “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” he told Garrett Haake of NBC News.

“War plans” were not discussed

Hegseth was near-apoplectic when asked about the breach in Hawaii. “I hear how it’s been characterized,” he said to conclude a lengthy rant on the issue before turning to face the camera. “Nobody was texting war plans.”

The White House is also denying war plans were discussed, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt writing on Tuesday: “1. No ‘war plans’ were discussed. 2. No classified material was sent to the thread.”

It really strains credulity, however, to claim that the targets of an upcoming military airstrike were not classified, just as it is really splitting hairs to claim the strikes do not constitute “war” as if to argue that the subject matter of the chat wasn’t that serious. The United States military conducting airstrikes in the Middle East is pretty damn serious, and Trump’s own National Security Council acknowledged that the chat Goldberg’s described was authentic.

One influential conservative who isn’t splitting hairs about the terminology of what was discussed is Fox News host Jesse Watters. “TRUMP TEAM TEXTS WAR PLANS TO THE WRONG PERSON,” read a chyron on his show Monday night.

Yes, it was bad, but it’s not a big deal

…but don’t let that chyron fool you. Watters essentially brushed off the breach, with another chyron reading: “WE’VE ALL TEXTED THE WRONG PERSON BEFORE.”

“Did you ever try to start a group text and you’re adding people and you accidentally add the wrong person, and all of a sudden your Aunt Mary knows all your raunchy plans for the bachelor party … well that kind of happened today with the Trump administration,” Watters said.

“It could have been a wee bit of a security breach,” Watters continued before bringing up Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. “I’m sure it won’t happen again.”

Trump took a similar tack on Tuesday, telling NBC News that Goldberg’s presence in the chat had “no impact at all,” calling the breach “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.”

So did House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). “I think the White House has acknowledged it’s a mistake,” he told reporters on Tuesday, adding that he believes that “it will tighten up and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

It’s not a big deal, and it’s good, actually

“It’s the president’s advisers discussing among themselves options they may recommend to the president,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told Laura Ingraham on Fox News, “and nobody can deny the success of what the president is doing here. This is what the leftist media is reduced to … now we’re griping about who’s on a text message and who’s not. I mean, come on.”

Fox News host Will Cain acknowledged that it was “concerning” that the information was shared with a journalist, but that the “bigger takeaway” is that the breach is a “transparent insight” into the “collaborative, open, honest, team-based attempt to come to the right decision.”

“If you read the content of these messages, I think you’ll come away proud that these are the leaders making these decisions in America,” Cain added.

Jim Hoft of the conservative outlet Gateway Pundit also praised those involved in the breach. “The chat itself, as recounted by Goldberg, is a masterclass in leadership,” he wrote. “Vance raised legit concerns about timing and messaging — proving he’s a thinker, not a yes-man — while Hegseth laid out the stakes: restoring freedom of navigation and reestablishing deterrence that Biden let crumble.”

Hoft went on to describe Goldberg’s concern over his inclusion in the national security discussion as “pearl clutching.”

The journalist is a fraud

Watters called Goldberg “one of the biggest hoax artists around.” So did Hegseth earlier on Monday. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist, who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the hoaxes of ‘Russia, Russia, Russia,” or the ‘fine people on both sides’ hoax, or the ‘suckers and losers’ hoax,” Hegseth said. “This is a guy who peddles in garbage. It’s what he does.” Leavitt, the White House press secretary, also jabbed Goldberg, leading off her statement on Tuesday by noting that he is “well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

Goldberg’s reporting has at times been inconvenient for Trump and his allies, but there’s no evidence it is fraudulent. Regardless, the Trump administration has already acknowledged that the group chat was real.

“This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”

The mission may have been carried out successfully, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly concerning that the people Trump put in charge of the United States military and the nation’s security are behaving this recklessly with sensitive information.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) stressed this concern to CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who were both on the group chat, during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. “There’s plenty of declassified information that our adversaries China and Russia are trying to break into encrypted systems like Signal,” he said. “I can say this: If this was the case with a military officer or an intelligence officer and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired.”