US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP
National Security Adviser Mike Waltz is at the centre of a new security scandal in the Donald Trump administration. As it turned out, he accidentally added The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, with whom he had never spoken, to an encrypted chat on Signal. The reason for this is the banal auto-fill of contacts on the iPhone. This was reported by The Guardian.
An internal White House investigation revealed that Waltz had mistakenly saved the journalist’s number under the name of another contact whom he intended to add to the group. Following the phone’s prompts, he then created a chat room on Signal to discuss sensitive issues, including possible US attacks on Houthi rebel positions in Yemen.
The publication of these details caused a shock in Washington. The leak of such information – even if accidental – provoked anger from Donald Trump, although he had officially publicly supported Waltz. However, according to the Washington Post, the president consulted with Vice President J.D. Vance and other senior officials on the advisability of keeping Waltz in office. In the end, Trump decided not to fire him in order to avoid a loud media scandal.
Goldberg, on the other hand, reported the situation to the press service, which passed it on, allowing the incident to be identified. Waltz denied any prior contact with the journalist and called the situation “a mistaken number being fed into the system”.
This technological breach, which has turned into a diplomatic scandal, has already been dubbed Signalgate in the US, a real challenge for the country’s national security systems in the age of smartphones and auto-complete.
