President Donald Trump is downplaying the impact of his administration’s shocking leak of secret war plans to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic — and he’s standing behind National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who invited the journalist to the group chat where the war plans were discussed.
In a brief interview with NBC’s Garrett Haake, Trump went to bat for Waltz — amid a report from Politico that numerous “high-level” White House aides want the NSA to resign.
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump told Haake.
Haake added that Trump downplayed the entire fiasco.
“The President told me he believes the story is essentially a non-issue,” Haake wrote on X. “And that Goldberg’s presence on the chat had ‘no impact at all.’ The attacks [on the Houthis], he continued, were ‘perfectly successful.’”
Trump added that he believes the episode has been his administration’s “only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.”
The comments are Trump’s first on the leak. At a news conference Monday, Trump claimed not to know anything about the leak — even though his administration had confirmed its authenticity hours earlier — and deflected by attacking The Atlantic.
“I don’t know anything about [the leak],” Trump 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.”
In an interview with CNN Monday night, Goldberg said that he told the White House about the leak nearly six hours before Trump made that comment at the press conference.
The post Trump Dismisses Bombshell War Plans Leak as a ‘Glitch,’ Goes to Bat for NSA Mike Waltz: He ‘Learned His Lesson’ first appeared on Mediaite.
