Cnn
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As President Donald Trump This week’s advisers have assumed the little enviable task of informing him of a journalist whom he hates having been inadvertently added to A group cat Discussing secret attack plans, a key detail required an additional explanation.
Before Monday, Trump said that he had never heard of a signal, the encrypted cat application where his national security advisor, defense secretary, vice-president, chief of staff and others had communicated on the upcoming strikes on Yemen.
With Trump only a recent convert to texts, a familiar person said he needed an assistant to explain what his team used exactly to transmit sensitive details on the calendar and the targets of the expected attack on the Houthis rebels.
In comments during the week, Trump seemed to master the application that launched a new Washington scandal.
The same goes for he seemed to form a stronger opinion on who was to blame. “I was told that it was Mike,” said Trump, referring to the national security advisor Mike Waltz, who, according to the Atlantic journalist, added him to the cat.
The whole episode frustrated TrumpAccording to people familiar with his opinions, in part because he thinks that it has spoiled what he considers a strong start to his second term. Speaking earlier this week, he considered him the first real “problem” of his second administration.
His embarrassment to the question was aggravated because he has a grudge against the journalist at the center of all this, the editor -in -chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.
And, as he absorbed what the signal application was exactly, he deplored a world where government secrets can be easily exploited on a mobile phone, suggesting that it may not be the wisest idea when he was trying to minimize the benefits.
“If it was me, everyone would have seated together in a room.
Subsequently, Trump in private declared in private his senior officials that advice on how they use signal – that a White House manager told CNN that the president did not have on his phone – should be revised, a process that should take place in the coming weeks.
Trump made a concerted effort to contain his embarrassment in public this week, and decided very early that the dismissal someone on the issue would only victory for his rivals and in the media, people said. None of his team proposed to resign.
However, even the president expressed a certain exasperation on the way in which the incident took place, which, according to him, was poorly reflected on his administration. As the week progressed, he elected several times to approach the question himself to journalists after the aid had trouble establishing a coherent explanation of what happened.
On Tuesday, he suggested that a “member of the lower level staff” could have repaired Goldberg. “Sometimes people are hooked and you don’t know they are hooked,” he said, shrucities as a daily technical snafu.
“I do not know anything about the signal,” he said to explain. “I am not involved.”
On Wednesday, he moved away from the “low -level staff member” without name and openly spoke of Waltz, who had taken responsibility the day before.
“It was Mike, I guess. I don’t know,” said Trump, trying to distance himself from the whole matter.
After his aid spent the previous days defending the use of the signal as a “approved” method to communicate sensitive information, Trump suggested that they could rethink.
“It could be a defective platform,” he said, “and we’re going to have to discover it.”
Trump and his team relied on a game book tested to refuse any serious reprehensible act, while diverting the blame on Goldberg – and the media as a whole for having covered history.
“It is a witch hunt,” said Trump in the oval office on Wednesday, using the same label he applied to all kinds of critical stories about him for many years.
However, for all his dismissals of the incident, he did not seem as bloody as some of his senior officials on the way everything happened.
“Someone in my group is messed up or it’s a bad signal,” he told Podcast “Vince” in a morning appearance on Wednesday, always apparently a little foggy about the details of the application.
Some other officials who were included in the cat did not seem completely convinced that the question was something to minimize.
“Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you are not supposed to be on this thing,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was traveling in Jamaica while the scandal took place at his home.
Rubio did not participate substantially in the cat, although it does not seem to express objections in real time in shared information, according to screenshots published in the Atlantic.
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent was also on the channel, but never weighed.
“One of the few advantages of being one of the elderly people in the office is that I still like to get the phone and call people,” he said on Fox News, a big smile on his face.
Vice-president JD Vance, who wrote in the cat, was concerned about the strike plans in part because he was “not sure that the president knows how incoherent it is with his message on Europe at the moment,” suggested on Friday that the discussions simply revealed that Trump’s team was trying to straighten their messages.
“What this flight has revealed, I think, was a private communication between the President’s superior advisers on the best way to prepare the American people for what we all thought they had to do,” he said during a visit to Greenland.
Before even accepting responsibility, most of the finger points inside the White House were directed to Waltz, which cat screenshots indicate that Goldberg added to the group. Waltz was among the first to inform the president of the incident on Monday, CNN previously reported.
However, Waltz was also not entirely to come in public on how, precisely, it happened, suggesting in an interview that Goldberg may have been “sucked” in one way or another to the conversation.
The National Security Council, the office of the White House Advisor and Elon Musk – The billionaire Tesla responsible for reforming the federal government – examined the issue.
Friday, the results of their survey had not been announced, but Vance said that an update should arrive “soon”.
Apparently, less worrying in Trump was The role of the Secretary of Defense Pete HegsethWho understood the sending of a sequence of the minute attack per minute to the conversation before it occurs, which, according to many national security experts and defense officials, was very classified.
“How to bring Hegseth to it? He had nothing to do with it,” said Trump when he was asked about the role of his Pentagon chief.
‘Someone has to go down for that’
Inside and outside Washington, Trump’s allies were not impressed by the White House attempts to minimize the incident.
“I hope someone would have a major error and apologize and say that it will not happen again. I hope someone would say that. This is what adults do, responsible adults do,” Senator Kevin Cramer said on Tuesday.
Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports who voted for Trump, was more frank.
“Someone has to descend for that,” he said in a self-proclaimed “diatribe” published online.
Thursday morning, the Republican President of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Best Democrat officially asked for an investigation and the evaluation by the interim inspector general of the Pentagon in the incident.
Waltz, who gave up a headquarters from Florida to assume the role of the White House, retains Trump’s confidence, said the president. Again the breed closer than expected to replace it At the Congress – where the GOP already has a narrow precarious majority – generated frustrations in the White House and led to an intervention by the Trump team.
A Trump’s high level advisor directly contacted the Senator of the Randy Fine status, the republican race to replace Waltz, with a message he needed to put his house in order and get on the air, said a source of the White House in CNN.
A few weeks later, the Republicans were preparing for a narrower result than scheduled Tuesday in the 6th Congress district in Florida, where their candidate was considerably a scandan and risks not being far from the president’s performance in November in the district.
Reflecting this concern, Trump called a pair of tele -mesters Thursday evening to give a boost to a fine – and highlight the issues.
“The whole country actually looks at it,” he said on Télé-Mally. “It’s very important.”