President Donald Trump on Wednesday downplayed US defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s role in sharing highly sensitive matters of national security to a group chat that included The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
“Hegseth is doing a great job, he had nothing to do with this,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, despite screenshots showing the defence secretary sharing plans for US strikes in Yemen with the Signal chat earlier this month.
Trump continued, “Hegseth? How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it. Look, look — it’s all a witch hunt.”
Trump’s comments arrived just moments after he said his national security adviser Mike Waltz, who Goldberg said invited him to the group, “claimed responsibility” for his role in the breached chat.
Trump on Signal-Gate: Hegseth is doing a great job, he had nothing to do with this. Hegseth? How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it. pic.twitter.com/pEe46PQI4T
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 26, 2025
Trump officials have shared head-spinning explanations for the text thread — and Goldberg’s inclusion in it — in recent days.
Waltz, who told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Tuesday that he took “full responsibility” for making the group, suggested that the editor may have intentionally infiltrated the chat.
Trump has claimed that a Waltz staffer was responsible for looping the editor into the chat, which the national security adviser would later contradict in his Fox News interview.
Waltz also told Ingraham that he never met Goldberg, despite a 2021 photograph showing the two next to each other in an event that the editor moderated at the French Embassy.
The Atlantic published messages from the chat on Wednesday, including those that show Hegseth sharing a detailed timeline of plans to attack the Houthis in Yemen.
Hegseth took to X, formerly Twitter, to slam The Atlantic’s report on Wednesday for publishing what he referred to as “so-called ‘war plans’” as he suggested that the information he shared was not a cause for alarm.
Hegseth has faced calls for his resignation over the scandal.
On Wednesday, Trump was asked by a reporter about GOP lawmakers who have called on his administration to take “more accountability” instead of downplaying the breach.
“Well, I don’t know about downplaying. The press up-plays it, I think it’s all a witch hunt, that’s all, I think it’s a witch hunt,” said Trump, noting that he “wasn’t involved” in the chat and calling for reporters to ultimately talk about the “unbelievably successful” strikes in Yemen.