Elon Musk’s crackerjack team of engineers is probing the mystery of how President Donald Trump’s national security adviser accidentally added a journalist to an unsecured group chat discussing potentially classified military intelligence.
“I just talked to Elon on the way here. We have the best technical minds looking at how this happened,” the group’s creator, Mike Waltz, told Fox News on Tuesday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed in a separate interview with Fox that “Elon Musk’s team of experts is looking at this, and the National Security Council is all digging into this matter to ensure this could never happen again.”
On Monday, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a bombshell report detailing how Waltz inadvertently added him to a group chat on the commercial messaging app Signal discussing strikes in Yemen against the Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group wreaking havoc on shipping traffic in the Suez Canal.
The group’s other members included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who shared detailed information about targets and weapons that aligned perfectly with a March 15 strike that killed 53 people.
“What was the technical glitch? These thumbs. These thumbs added you, and that’s the technical glitch,” CNN political commentator Ashley Allison said during a Tuesday round-table discussion on the investigation.
“The idea that you need to bring in Elon Musk—the richest man in the world, who’s got five tech companies—to figure out your thumbs?” panel member Van Jones said.
“Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse,” Allison added.
Musk has become one of Trump’s most powerful advisers after pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the president’s re-election campaign.
As head of the secretive Department of Government Efficiency, he has recruited a team of young engineers and coders with no government experience to help shutter federal agencies, cancel hundreds of billions of dollars of government contracts, and purge the civil service.
During Tuesday’s panel, commentator S.E. Cupp argued that Musk’s involvement in what’s been dubbed “Signalgate” was just distracting from the fact that the Trump administration was discussing military operations on an unsecured, unauthorized messaging platform.
In 2023, a Pentagon memo warned against using Signal and other mobile for any nonpublic, official information, NPR reported.
On March 18, an agency-wide email repeated that Signal shouldn’t be used even for non-classified communications because Russian hackers were using the “linked devices” feature to spy on encrypted conversations.
In addition to the security concerns, using Signal violates federal laws requiring public officials to preserve records of their conduct, the nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday against the group chat members. The app allows to users to delete messages.
The Yemen group chat “presents a substantial risk that they have used and continue to use Signal in other contexts,” the suit alleges. The defendants did not respond to the Daily Beast’s requests for comment.
Instead of bringing in DOGE—which despite the record-keeping concerns also uses Signal for all of its communications—the Trump administration just needs to “follow the law,” Jones told Tuesday’s panel.
Responding to the suggestion that Waltz and his fellow group chat members needed more operational security training, he said, “They don’t let you walk in that building without the [proper] training. The training is: Follow the law and don’t do nonsense.”
