National security adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, will be leaving their posts, CBS News reported Thursday, citing multiple sources. Mike was the central figure of the Signal Gate scandal, in which Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal group where defense secretary Pete Hegseth shared the Yemen war plan. For days, the Donald Trump administration played down the leak, saying there was no war plan in those messages — but now, with the news of Mike Waltz being out of his role, it seems the administration has decided to make Waltz responsible for the leak.
Speculations were rife about whether Waltz should resign as he added Goldberg to the Signal group which had several of Trump’s cabinet members, including vice president JD Vance. Waltz never offered to resign and Trump also signaled his support for Waltz by calling him a “good man” who learned a lesson from this episode.
Alex Wong served in the first Trump administration as deputy special representative for North Korea and also as deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department. In announcing his appointment, Trump said that Wong helped negotiate his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
What Waltz said about the war plan leak
Waltz took the responsibility of creating the group chat named ‘Houthi PC Small Group’. But he struggled to remember adding Goldberg to the group. He also said he did not know Goldberg and did not have his number saved on his phone. He, in fact, gave a strange theory of how Goldberg’s number might have been sucked in to his phone from his contacts. Waltz also deflected blame by calling Goldberg a “loser” and implying, without evidence, that the journalist might have deliberately infiltrated the chat.
An internal investigation revealed that Waltz had mistakenly saved Goldberg’s number under another contact’s name during the 2024 campaign.
Further damaging Waltz’s credibility, The Washington Post reported that he and his National Security Council (NSC) staff used personal Gmail accounts for government business, a practice the White House defended as compliant with federal records retention but which critics argued compromised security.
