Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
Mike Waltz appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show on Tuesday night to discuss why he added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group text about war plans. It seems the national security adviser’s goal was to declare that he was taking responsibility for the debacle, while actually shifting the blame to the editor of The Atlantic and (even more nonsensically) Democrats and the Biden administration. Instead, Waltz basically delivered a live reenactment of the “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” meme, minus the hot dog costume.
Waltz kicked off the interview by announcing he’s “not a conspiracy theorist” and immediately floating a vague conspiracy theory about how Goldberg wound up in the chat.
“Of all the people out there, somehow this guy who has lied about the president, who has lied to Gold Star families, lied to their attorneys and gone to Russia hoax, gone to all kinds of lengths to lie and smear the president of the United States, and he’s the one that somehow gets on somebody’s contact and then gets sucked into your group?” Waltz said.
Laura Ingraham: “How did a Trump-hating editor of The Atlantic end up on your Signal chat?”
Mike Waltz: “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but of all the people out there, somehow this guy…he’s the one that somehow gets on somebody’s contact and then gets sucked into the group? pic.twitter.com/TP6HXTWPtQ
— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) March 25, 2025
So, Ingraham asked, was Waltz suggesting someone on his team added Goldberg?
“Well, no,” he replied. “It’s embarrassing, yes. We’re going to get to the bottom of it. We have — I just talked to Elon on the way here. We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.”
A moment later, Elon Musk’s crack team of investigators got a huge lead when Waltz conceded that he’s the guy who added the journalist to the chat.
“Look, a staffer wasn’t responsible,” he said. “I take full responsibility. I built the group and my job is to make sure everything is coordinated.”
So Waltz was communicating with Goldberg and accidentally added him to the group text, just as we all suspected? If only it were that simple!
“I can tell you for 100 percent, I don’t know this guy,” Waltz said. “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.”
Mike Waltz on the Signal chat leak:
“I just talked to @elonmusk… we’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened. I don’t know this guy—he’s the bottom scum of journalists.” pic.twitter.com/1TqToWQOZZ
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 25, 2025
The national security adviser then fleshed out his conspiracy theory, suggesting that Goldberg might have catfished him, on the off chance that Waltz would invite him to a high-level text thread about bombing Houthi targets in Yemen.
“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there?” he asked Ingraham. “So of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else. Now whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical means is something we’re trying to figure out.”
So who broached U. S. national security via a duplicitous contact card? That’s a question for the boys at DOGE, not the national security adviser:
INGRAHAM: But how did it end up in your phone?
WALTZ: Well, that’s what we’re trying to figure out.
INGRAHAM: But, that’s a pretty big problem … that’s disturbing.
WALTZ: That’s why we’ve got the best technical minds, right?
Finally, Ingraham — who asked surprisingly tough questions for a woman who recently nodded along as Donald Trump claimed gold paint doesn’t exist — pressed Waltz again on whether he knows Goldberg.
“No idea,” Waltz said. “Wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, if I saw him in a police lineup. I do now. Knew him by reputation for lying about the president over and over and over again. What I can tell you for certain, certainly wasn’t reaching out or talking to him at all. Why would I?”
Then Waltz called Goldberg “vile,” accusing him once again of being a rampant liar.
Waltz asks you this: what kind of person would publicly lie to the American people? Think about that for one second.
Michael Waltz claimed that he’s “never met, don’t know, never communicated with” Jeffrey Goldberg.
Here’s a photo of Waltz standing next to Goldberg during a 2021 event at the French Embassy.
The event Waltz attended—a Q&A with a French filmmaker—was moderated by Goldberg. pic.twitter.com/eTqOY7xnTl
— Anna Bower (@AnnaBower) March 26, 2025
Here’s Waltz’s full interview with Ingraham:
