President Donald Trump again addressed the stunning Signal messaging app scandal from earlier this week, calling the Atlantic’s reporting on it “fake news” and suggesting he won’t be firing any of his Cabinet members who were part of the group chat.
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported earlier this week that he was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat discussing imminent strikes on the Yemeni Houthis. In the encrypted chat were many of Trump’s top Cabinet members, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance. Since the national security lapse, calls have come from many figures on the Left for Hegseth, Waltz, or the pair, to resign.
But Trump shot back at any supposed wavering of his confidence in Hegseth or Waltz in an NBC News interview on Saturday, saying he doesn’t “fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts.”
“I think it’s just a witch hunt and the fake news, like you, talk about it all the time, but it’s just a witch hunt, and it shouldn’t be talked [about],” the president said.
He further called the story “nonsense” that has detracted from the U.S.’s successful strikes against the Houthis, which began in mid-March and Trump characterized as “tremendously successful.”
“All I can tell you is it’s just a witch hunt, and it’s the only thing the press wants to talk about, because you have nothing else to talk about. Because it’s been the greatest 100-day presidency in the history of our country,” he said.
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Trump also dismissed any talk about the app the encrypted chat took place on, Signal, which is now at the center of a lawsuit filed by the left-leaning nonprofit group American Oversight. That complaint alleges the U.S. officials were not properly preserving Signal messages and that some were being erased entirely through the app’s auto-delete function, in violation of the Federal Records Act. Judge James Boasberg, now a frequent target of Trump, has since ordered five of Trump’s Cabinet members to preserve all Signal messages sent from March 11 to March 15.
The president said on Saturday that he has “no idea what Signal is. I don’t care what Signal is.”
