Agencies WASHINGTON

Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said he took full responsibility for a stunning leak of military plans in a Signal chat, while Trump intervened to defend him, saying it was “the only glitch in two months”.“I take full responsibility. I built the group. My job is to make sure everything is coordinated,” Waltz said in an interview with Fox News, when asked which staffer  was responsible.

The Trump administration has scrambled to contain the fallout since the Atlantic published a story on Monday revealing that its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been inadvertently added to a chat with Waltz and other senior White House officials – including Vice-President JD Vance, defence secretary Pete Hegseth and secretary of state Marco Rubio. The group discussed sensitive operational information about planned US airstrikes on Yemen, The Guardian reported.

When pressed by Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Waltz accepted responsibility for making the Signal group, though he continued to deflect blame, insulted Goldberg and said he couldn’t explain how the mistake had occurred. “It’s embarrassing, yes. We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” Waltz said, adding that he was consulting with Elon Musk: “We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.”

When the Fox host asked how Goldberg’s number ended up in the group, Waltz responded: “Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there? … Of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else. Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical means is something we’re trying to figure out.” Waltz did not offer any evidence for how Goldberg could have “deliberately” ended up in the group.