'Somehow it gets sucked in': Waltzing thru the Signal scandal
Trump's national security advisor can trash talk The Atlantic. It gets trickier if he's eventually caught in a lie.
Have you ever had a contact in your phone that shows a person’s name with someone else’s number? In contemplating this for awhile, I recalled a couple sources sharing the same name in my device, which prompted my Iphone to stubbornly attempt to merge the contacts into one — despite my best efforts resisting. Andy Barr was one, well actually two. One Andy Barr was a Democratic staffer for Al Franken; the other was a former Politico colleague who now runs a Democratic digital firm in Arizona. Different Andy Barrs, but their contacts became jumbled into one in my phone’s contacts.
Is this what happened to National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on March 11 when he sent a Signal request to Jeffrey Goldberg — the editor in chief of The Atlantic — and ostensibly added him to a high-level national security group chat with the likes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance? That’s the answer the former Florida congressman landed on Tuesday evening on Laura Ingraham’s Fox program, as he sought to clean up the first piping hot scandal of the second Trump administration and prevent himself from becoming its first scalp.
“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there? Right? You’ve got somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact, so of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else.”
— National Security Advisor Mike Waltz to Laura Ingraham
Even if you believe Waltz’s explanation, it would still mean he had Goldberg’s precise number in his phone — when earlier in the day he claimed he had never met the bonafide Trump adversary. It’s a slippery explanation for Waltz, especially if Goldberg has additional evidence of their previous conversations. Those texts or calls may have been cloaked on background or *off the record* terms, but if Waltz continues to insult Goldberg or bitterly impugn his integrity, particularly about the veracity of their relationship, those previously agreed to terms could splinter. Or those privileged communications could be leaked to a third party to expose Waltz’s fallacy. Which is to remind folks of the oldest adage in Washington: the cover-up is worse than the crime.
Given President Trump’s visceral contempt for Goldberg and The Atlantic, Waltz can likely survive an error that many lawmakers and national security experts believe endangered U.S. national security. What Waltz cannot afford is to be caught in an elaborate lie. Remember Trump filed his first national security adviser Michael Flynn, because he lied to then-Vice President Mike Pence and the FBI about his contacts with Russia.
But to take Waltz at his word, you have to believe he had Jeffrey Goldberg’s phone number in his device — even though he had never met or previously communicated with him — and then just happened to pull up that very number when he accidentally placed in the Signal chat.
Even Ingraham seemed flabbergasted by Waltz’s explanation: “But you’ve never talked to him before, so how’s the number on your phone?”
“Well if you have somebody else’s contact and then somehow it gets sucked in,” he said. “It gets sucked in.”
Can Waltz survive? I explore that question in this piece for The Miami Herald. You can read that story HERE.
“How many other Signal chains are out there? Is there a China XYZ Signal chat? Is there a Russia ABC Signal chat? Is this the tip of the iceberg? That’s the worst case scenario, that they’ve routinely been using a commercial application to discuss our nation’s most guarded secrets … If this is sort of a first drip of a leaky faucet, maybe Trump throws someone overboard.”
