President Donald Trump said there is one lesson his administration has learnt from Signalgate.
“I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?” Trump said of the messaging application in an interview with The Atlantic published Monday.
“If you want to know the truth. I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal, although it’s been used by a lot of people,” he added. “But, whatever it is, whoever has it, whoever owns it, I wouldn’t want to use it.”
Last month, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, said he had been inadvertently added to a Signal group chat by the White House National security advisor, Mike Waltz.
Goldberg said the group chat was called “Houthi PC small group” and included other officials like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “PC” stood for “principals committee,” Goldberg said.
Waltz and the other Trump officials were discussing details of a planned US strike on Houthi rebels in the chat, Goldberg said. The National Security Council later confirmed to Business Insider that the group chat was authentic.
Trump initially said he didn’t know about the security breach. He later defended Waltz and Hegseth, saying he would not fire them over this incident.
“How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it. Look, it’s all a witch hunt,” Trump told reporters on March 26.
“I don’t know that Signal works. I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you,” Trump added.
First released in 2014, Signal is a nonprofit, open-sourced, end-to-end encrypted messaging platform.
Last month, Signal wrote in an X post that misinformation was “flying around that might drive people away from Signal and private communications.”
“One piece of misinfo we need to address is the claim that there are ‘vulnerabilities’ in Signal,” it wrote on March 25, citing an NPR report which quoted a Pentagon email it obtained, warning employees about a potential vulnerability in the messaging application.
“The memo used the term ‘vulnerability’ in relation to Signal — but it had nothing to do with Signal’s core tech. It was warning against phishing scams targeting Signal users,” Signal wrote in its post.
Representatives for Trump and Signal did not respond to requests for comment from BI.
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