‘I take full responsibility’: Trump advisor Mike Waltz on accidental Yemen military plan ‘leak’

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz claimed "full responsibility" for mistakenly adding a journalist to a group chat in which top American officials discussed impending strikes in Yemen.

"I take full responsibility. I built the group; my job is to make sure everything's coordinated," Waltz told Fox News in his first interview on Tuesday.

He said he does not personally know Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist who was added to the chat.

“It's embarrassing. We're going to get to the bottom of it,” Waltz was quoted as saying.

Waltz said he had spoken earlier in the day with Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc. CEO and billionaire Trump adviser, adding “we’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened.”

“We made a mistake. We’re moving forward,” Waltz said.

Waltz suggested the leak was the result of him mistakenly saving Goldberg's number under another name. "Have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else's number?" he said.

What happened exactly?

Questions were raised after Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a text group of top officials discussing plans for military strikes in Yemen.

The Trump team shared the plans on the encrypted messaging app Signal. It's popular encrypted messaging service used by journalists and government officials.

Goldberg recounted the incident in a story published Monday. The text group, which also included Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others, discussed details of plans for an attack on Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Goldberg did not publish the actual plans in the article but wrote that Hegseth at one point shared “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen,” including targeting information and weapons specifications.

Trump downplays firestorm

US President Donald Trump downplayed the firestorm on Tuesday after a journalist was accidentally added to a group chat.

"There was no classified information," Trump told reporters when asked about the chat, saying that the commercial app Signal was used by “a lot of people in government.”

He said, "I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic. He added, "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."

The Atlantic responded to "The Ingraham Angle" in part saying, “attempts to disparage and discredit The Atlantic, our editor, and our reporting follow an obvious playbook by elected officials and others in power who are hostile to journalists and the First Amendment rights of all Americans…”

Trump defends Waltz

According to Fox news, Trump defended Waltz, saying the national security advisor will not be fired over the incident despite some Democrats calling for Waltz and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to resign following the apparent national security breach.

"He’s not getting fired," Trump told Fox News. The president said the incident was a "mistake," though there was "nothing important" in the Signal text thread.

"I don't think he should apologize," the president was quoted as saying. “I think he's doing his best. It's equipment and technology that's not perfect," he added.