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Just seven days after the Signal chat scandal erupted, the White House announced that it doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. In fact, it was Monday when press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that, as far as she and her colleagues are concerned, “this case has been closed.”
Unfortunately for Team Trump, political controversies can sometimes persist, even as some of those involved try to move on. The Washington Post reported:
Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.
The Post’s report hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, and national security council spokesperson said after the original article was published that Waltz “has never sent classified material over his personal email account or any unsecured platform.”
Nevertheless, the allegations — which obviously have some notable parallels to the 2016 hysteria surrounding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email protocols — don’t do the beleaguered White House national security advisor any favors. There’s the surface-level problem, involving the accusation that Waltz conducted government business over personal email, coupled with the related problem that some of his colleagues apparently wanted the Washington Post to know about all of this.
Indeed, let’s not lose sight of the larger pattern. The day after the revelations raised by the Post, Politico reported that Waltz’s team “regularly set up chats on Signal to coordinate official work ... according to four people who have been personally added to Signal chats.”
The report added that there have been “at least 20 such chats” that have included “sensitive information.”
What’s more, just two days before the Post published its report, The Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that Waltz “created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members.”
The same report added that senior U.S. officials believe the damage to Waltz’s reputation “has put him on shaky ground in the White House,” adding that he has “lost sway with the president.”
This dovetailed with an NBC News report that said Donald Trump had privately “expressed frustration” with Waltz. Which coincided with a Politico report on a private presidential meeting last week in which top officials, including Vice President JD Vance, told Trump to “consider showing him [Waltz] the door.”
A day later, The New York Times reported that the president sought the counsel of a variety of people on whether to oust Waltz.
The revelations about Waltz are notable in their own right, but just as important is the story behind the stories: There are insiders willing to talk to news organizations about Waltz’s troubles, which is never a good sign for an official feeling political heat.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.