Mike Waltz faces new scrutiny over public Venmo account
Mike Waltz is under pressure for his role in the Signalgate scandal, after he included a leading national security journalist on a group chat concerning air strikes in Yemen.
But Donald Trump’s national security adviser may have another growing problem, over news that he left his list of Venmo contacts public – at least until reporters noticed and asked him about it yesterday.
Wired has its report here. It begins:
Analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz’s personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others – information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends, experts say.
Among the accounts linked to ‘Michael Waltz’ are ones that appear to belong to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Walker Barrett, a staffer on the United States National Security Council. Both were fellow participants in a now-infamous Signal group chat called ‘Houthi PC small group.’
Key events
Hugo Lowell
Donald Trump is unlikely to fire Mike Waltz, or anyone else involved in the now-infamous sharing of military plans in a group chat, to avoid even a tacit admission of fault, according to two administration officials close to the president.
Trump repeated his public support for Waltz at the Oval Office on Wednesday, saying his national security adviser had taken responsibility for creating the group chat and for unintentionally adding the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg.
The officials said Trump rarely if ever admits mistakes, and has reportedly enjoyed the ferocious response of Waltz and other White House officials, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to critical reporting of the leak.
The president also defended Hegseth’s involvement. “He had nothing to do with this. Hegseth? How do you bring Hegseth into this?”
Hegseth sent the messages that sparked the classification concerns. The contradiction appears to underscore Trump’s personal determination to not hand the Atlantic a victory, a person familiar with the matter said, and indicates he will continue to characterize the leak of attack plans as minor and immaterial.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration’s attempts to defend the leak of sensitive military plans on grounds that they were not classified became harder to reconcile on Wednesday, after the Atlantic published the full text chain showing the level of detail of the attack plans.
Full story:
Reporting Mike Waltz’s apparent carelessness with his Venmo contacts, which remained public until Wednesday, Wired refers to previous such stories including one last year concerning JD Vance, now Donald Trump’s vice-president.
The site also quotes expert opinion on the risks involved with leaving such information public.
The first thing you think of is the counterintelligence issue, right? And the security vulnerabilities. It kind of boggles the mind, in a way,” says Michael Ard, a former intelligence analyst who now runs the masters program in intelligence analysis at Johns Hopkins. “It would be really easy for somebody to spoof a contact, and that is something the security industry has already been issuing notices on.”
Wired goes on to point out that in February, the American Prospect identified a public Venmo account in the name of Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned US defense secretary who shared classified information in the Signal chat about Yemen.
The Hegseth account “revealed a similarly elite network” to that on Waltz’s account, Wired said, “including names matching executives at defense firms like Palantir and Anduril as well as lobbyists and President George W Bush-era officials”.
Mike Waltz’s contacts list on Venmo, the online payments platform, was public until Wednesday when reporters from more than one outlet asked the national security adviser about it. The list disappeared and the White House declined to comment.
Waltz was already under pressure, over his role in the “Signalgate” scandal, in which a journalist was added to a group chat about airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, a platform on which sensitive national security information was shared.
Wired said its reporting about Waltz’s Venmo account “suggests that the Signal group chat was not an isolated mistake, but part of a broader pattern of what national security experts describe as reckless behavior by some of the most powerful people in the US government”.
According to Wired, Waltz had 328 Venmo friends, among them White House officials including Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, former colleagues of Waltz in the US House, and journalists including prominent Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade, and Kristen Holmes and Brianna Keilar of CNN.
Notably, the list also included Ivan Raiklin, a far-right figure who anointed himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution” and created a “target list” including prominent figures.
Wired also noted that Waltz was not the only Trump White House figure to have left their Venmo friends list public – Wiles did too.
A Venmo spokesperson said: “We take our customers’ privacy seriously, which is why we … make it incredibly simple for customers to make these private if they choose to do so.”
Wired and the Atlantic – which broke Signalgate as its editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was the journalist added to the chat – are not alone in reporting apparent online security weaknesses among Trump’s top team:
Mike Waltz faces new scrutiny over public Venmo account
Mike Waltz is under pressure for his role in the Signalgate scandal, after he included a leading national security journalist on a group chat concerning air strikes in Yemen.
But Donald Trump’s national security adviser may have another growing problem, over news that he left his list of Venmo contacts public – at least until reporters noticed and asked him about it yesterday.
Wired has its report here. It begins:
Analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz’s personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others – information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends, experts say.
Among the accounts linked to ‘Michael Waltz’ are ones that appear to belong to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Walker Barrett, a staffer on the United States National Security Council. Both were fellow participants in a now-infamous Signal group chat called ‘Houthi PC small group.’
Next, Pete Hegseth. He came to the Pentagon, remember, from Fox News. But reporting from the same outlet won’t make comfortable reading for him this morning.
Yesterday evening, Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’s chief national security correspondent, made the point that though Mike Waltz set up the Signal chat and invited a top journalist into it, Hegseth was the official who disclosed the most sensitive information – broadcasting it to a group of entirely hackable phones.
Here’s Griffin, on X, dissecting Hegseth’s angry, semantics-based contention that the Atlantic’s description of “attack plans” shows the chat to which it gained access was not so sensitive as one concerning “war plans”:
“I surveyed a range of current and former US defense officials who agreed ‘war plans’ is not the right term but what was shared may have been FAR MORE sensitive given the operational details and time stamps ahead of the operation, which could have placed US military pilots in harm’s way.
What Hegseth shared two hours ahead of the strikes were time sensitive ‘attack orders’ or ‘operational plans’ with actual timing of the strikes and mention of F18s, MQ9 Reapers and Tomahawks. This information is typically sent through classified channels to the commanders in the field as ‘secret, no forn’ message. In other words the information is ‘classified’ and should not be shared through insecure channels.
“‘Attack orders’ or ‘attack sequence’ puts the joint force directly and immediately at risk, according to former senior defense official #1.
It allows the enemy to move the target and increase lethal actions against US forces.
“This kind of real time operational information is more sensitive than “war plans”, which makes this lapse more egregious, according to two former senior US defense officials.
This information was clearly classified,” according to former senior defense official #1.
“The Defense Secretary can retroactively declassify information after the fact, but the fact that this was shared in real time before the strike took place makes it unlikely to have been declassified when it was being shared and seen by the journalist for the Atlantic who was inadvertently included in the Signal chat.
“According to a second former senior US defense official, when Hegseth says he didn’t release ‘war plans’ that is pure semantics. These were ‘attack plans’. ‘If you are revealing who is going to be attacked (Houthis – the name of the text chain), it still gives the enemy warning. When you release the time of the attack – all of that is always ‘classified’.’”
In Washington, it’s day four of what the media is duly, inevitably, calling Signalgate: the scandal over the addition of a leading national security journalist to a chat between top national security figures about air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Politico, meanwhile, has some much more interesting things to say about the continued job prospects of two men at the heart of the scandal: Mike Waltz, Donald Trump’s national security adviser who added Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic to his Signal chat, and Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned defense secretary who shared war plans on the chat and like Waltz has responded to reporters with bluster, denial and virulent abuse of Goldberg.
Waltz first.
Dasha Burns, White House bureau chief for Politico, reports: “Waltz’s relationship with top White House staff was fraying before this. And between the substance of the story and his handling of the fallout, the walls are closing in.
One person close to White House tells me: ‘He has no credibility because he continues to lie. Everyone is united against him. When you’re becoming a liability or a distraction for the president, it’s time to resign.’
As Politico says … “Oof.”
Burns, however, also reports that “although Waltz has been on thin ice for a while, Signalgate may actually save him – for now – because ‘they don’t want to give Goldberg a scalp.’ So it’s possible Waltz survives or that it requires a little distance from this relentless news cycle before the proverbial guillotine comes down.”
Here’s more on the scandal – and a rather, let’s say timely development, given other Trump administration priorities:
Julia Kollewe
Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on all car imports, sending shares in carmakers around the world sharply lower.
Trump said in the Oval Office that the tariffs “start off with a 2.5% base, which is what we’re at, and go to 25%”.
The new levies on cars and light trucks will take effect on 3 April, a day after Trump plans to announce reciprocal tariffs aimed at the countries responsible for the bulk of the US trade deficit.
Shares in US carmakers fell in after-hours trading after Trump’s announcement, with General Motors down by 6.2% and Ford 4.7% lower.
Cars are the UK’s biggest goods export to the US, with £6.4bn in sales in 2023, led by manufacturers such as Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover.
Aston Martin was the top faller on the FTSE 100 index in London on Thursday morning, with the shares falling 6% to hit a record low of 67p. The FTSE 100 fell more than 50 points.
Stephanie Kirchgaessner
A cutting-edge technology expected to foster new medical breakthroughs in treatments for cancers and infectious disease is being treated “like a four-letter word” inside the Trump administration, causing panic among scientists who fear Trump-appointed health officials, driven by misinformation and conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 vaccine, will cut critical research in the field.
Scientists and public health experts interviewed by the Guardian are sounding the alarm over a recent move by the National Institutes of Health to collect information about funding for research into mRNA technology.
Some fear it is the first step in a move to cut or defund grants that involve the technology, which was an essential component in the rapid creation of vaccines against Covid-19, a major accomplishment of the first Trump term in fighting the pandemic.
Messenger RNA technology, which in the case of Covid-19 teaches the body to fight infection by introducing immune cells to the coronavirus’s characteristic spike proteins, is being tested for use against diseases ranging from bird flu and dengue, to pancreatic cancer and melanoma.
While the NIH has not formally stated that it is cutting mRNA vaccine and therapy research, scientists who were interviewed by the Guardian said they have been told informally that the NIH is performing key word searches on grants that mention mRNA vaccine-related technology and related phrases.
“Colleagues have also been advised not to apply for mRNA vaccine grants. This is all through the grapevine. There has not been an official statement about it,” said one New York-based scientist.
The NIH confirmed in a statement to the Guardian that it made a “data call” to learn more information about the funding of mRNA vaccine grants.
The Gavi vaccine alliance’s chief said on Thursday that any cut in US funding risks causing more than a million deaths, after a report that Washington is to back out.
“A cut in Gavi’s funding from the US would have a disastrous impact on global health security, potentially resulting in over a million deaths from preventable diseases and endangering lives everywhere from dangerous disease outbreaks,” the international vaccine organisation’s chief executive Sania Nishtar told Agence France-Presse (AFP) by email.
Martin Pengelly
Top aides to Joe Biden “aggressively” warned Democratic donors last summer that if the then president was forced out of the 2024 election over concerns about his age and fitness, the party would inevitably make the “mistake” of running the vice-president, Kamala Harris, against Donald Trump, a new book says.
“One donor on the receiving end of an electronic message summed up the sentiments of Biden’s top aides: ‘They were aggressively saying that we would wind up with the vice-president and that would be a mistake.’”
Biden was forced out and Harris did become the nominee. Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ account of the campaign that followed, will be published next week – as Trump’s second term enters its third tempestuous month. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Published extracts from the book have described controversial episodes from Harris’s short campaign and conclusive defeat, including her inability to land an interview with the influential podcaster Joe Rogan, in contrast to Trump, and her frustration with close control maintained by former aides to Biden.
Long an issue for Democrats, the question of Biden’s age and fitness came to a head on 27 June, when the president performed disastrously onstage with Trump in Atlanta. Parnes and Allen provide detailed and dramatic insights into the crisis.
Amid calls for Biden to withdraw, the authors write, aides to Biden “frantically push[ed] back in phone calls and in text messages, accusing donors of promoting their own agendas at the expense of Biden, the party, and the country”
Trump threatens higher tariffs on EU and Canada if they work together ‘to do economic harm’ to US
President Donald Trump has said that if the EU works with Canada “to do economic harm to the USA”, then “large scale tariffs, far larger than currently planned” will be placed on them both.
Writing on the Truth Social network on Thursday, Trump said the threatened higher tariffs would be placed in order “to protect the best friend that each of those two countries has ever had”.
French president Emmanuel Macron spoke with US president Donald Trump before a meeting of 30 countries with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the French presidency said on Thursday.
Macron and the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, are hosting the meeting to discuss strengthening military support to Ukraine and what future role Ukraine’s allies could have to guarantee security if there were a peace deal with Russia.
Joseph Gedeon
Republican House speaker Mike Johnson suggested potentially defunding, restructuring or eliminating US federal courts as a means of pushing back against judicial decisions that have challenged Donald Trump’s policies.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Johnson, a former constitutional attorney, raised the prospect of congressional intervention in the court system.
“We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court,” Johnson said.
While Johnson later clarified that his remarks were meant to illustrate Congress’s broad constitutional powers rather than a direct threat, it traces the mounting pressure from Trump’s allies to challenge judicial independence.
Republican lawmakers have grown more visibly frustrated with federal judges blocking Trump administration actions, particularly regarding immigration policies.
One particular point of their ire is US district judge James Boasberg, who recently issued a nationwide injunction preventing the deportation of Venezuelan immigrants. Trump has since called to impeach Boasberg over his decision, and several House Republicans have taken up the call to introduce articles of impeachment against him and other judges who have issued similar nationwide injunctions.
Article III of the US constitution gives Congress the power to establish lower federal courts, and there’s historical precedent: Congress has eliminated courts before, such as the commerce court in 1913. And the House judiciary chair, Jim Jordan, has suggested that some legislative moves are being explored that could home in on potential funding restrictions.
The US supreme court upheld on Wednesday a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns” imposed by Joe Biden’s administration in a crackdown on firearms whose use has proliferated in crimes nationwide.
The justices, in a 7-2 ruling authored by conservative justice Neil Gorsuch, overturned a lower court’s decision that the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had exceeded its authority in issuing the 2022 rule targeting parts and kits for ghost guns.
Conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Gorsuch was joined in the majority by conservative justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh as well as the court’s three liberal members.
Ghost gun products are typically bought online and may be quickly assembled at home, without the serial numbers ordinarily used to trace guns or background checks on purchasers required for other firearms.
Plaintiffs including parts manufacturers, various gun owners and two gun rights groups – the Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation – sued to block the ATF rule in federal court in Texas.
The regulation required manufacturers of firearms kits and parts, such as partly complete frames or receivers, to mark their products with serial numbers, obtain licenses and conduct background checks on purchasers, as already required for other commercially made firearms.
The rule clarified that these kits and components are covered by the definition of “firearm” under a 1968 federal law called the Gun Control Act and that commercial manufacturers of such kits must become licensed.
UK will not ‘escalate’ trade wars after Trump car tariff, says finance minister
The UK does not want to escalate trade wars, finance minister Rachel Reeves said on Thursday after US president Donald Trump announced import tariffs on cars and auto parts. The response came with London locked in talks with Washington over potentially securing a post-Brexit trade deal.
“We’re not at the moment in a position where we want to do anything to escalate these trade wars,” Reeves told Sky News, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“We are looking to secure a better trading relationship with the United States,” she told the broadcaster, adding that the Labour government was “in extensive talks” with the Trump administration over securing a trade deal.
Trump on Wednesday announced steep tariffs on the auto sector, provoking threats of retaliation from trading partners ahead of further promised trade levies next week.
“What we’re going to be doing is a 25% tariff on all cars that are not made in the United States,” Trump said, as he signed the order in the Oval Office. The duties take effect at 12.01 am (04.01 GMT) on 3 April and impact foreign-made cars and light trucks. Key automobile parts will also be hit within the month.
The UK trade body for the auto sector urged the US and the UK to strike a deal that avoids Trump’s “disappointing” tariffs on foreign-made cars, reports AFP.
“The industry urges both sides to come together immediately and strike a deal that works for all,” Mike Hawes, chief executive at the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said in a statement late Wednesday.
“The UK and US auto industries have a longstanding and productive relationship, with US consumers enjoying vehicles built in Britain by some iconic brands, while thousands of UK motorists buy cars made in America,” Hawes noted.
He said that “rather than imposing additional tariffs, we should explore ways in which opportunities for both British and American manufacturers can be created as part of a mutually beneficial relationship, benefiting consumers and creating jobs and growth across the Atlantic.”
Speaking at the end of January, Hawes said the Us was “an important market” for UK-produced luxury brands such as Bentley and Rolls-Royce, adding that this allowed for “a greater opportunity to absorb” tariffs.
President Donald Trump’s plan to impose a 25% tariff on imported cars and light trucks starting next week is “very bad news” and the only solution for now is for the European Union to raise its own tariffs, French finance minister Eric Lombard said on Thursday.
Lombard, who was speaking on France Inter radio, said he hoped be able to discuss soon with his US counterparts in view of lowering those tariffs, adding a trade war would lead “to nothing”, reports Reuters.
Trump, who sees tariffs as a tool to raise revenue to offset his promised tax cuts and to revive a long-declining US industrial base, said collections would begin on 3 April.
Private data of Trump officials in Signal scandal accessible online: report
The private data of top security advisers to US President Donald Trump can be accessed online, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday, adding to the fallout from the officials’ use of a Signal group chat to plan airstrikes on Yemen.
Mobile phone numbers, email addresses and in some cases passwords used by national security adviser Mike Waltz, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard can be found via commercial data-search services and hacked data dumped online, it reported. It is not clear in all cases how recent the details are.
The Trump administration has been facing calls for the resignation of senior officials amid bipartisan criticism after Monday’s embarrassing revelations. The chat group, which included vice-president JD Vance, Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and others, discussed sensitive plans to carry out strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen via the Signal app, potentially threatening the safety of US servicemen and women taking part in the operation.
On Wednesday evening, Trump backed Hegseth, saying “He had nothing to do with this” and calling the scandal a “witch-hunt”.
The phone numbers and email addresses – mostly current – were in some cases used for Instagram and LinkedIn profiles, cloud-storage service Dropbox, and apps that track a user’s location.
Der Spiegel reported it was “particularly easy” to discover Hegseth’s mobile number and email address, using a commercial provider of contact information. It found that the email address, and in some cases even the password associated with it, could be found in more than 20 data leaks. It reported that it was possible to verify that the email address was used just a few days ago.
It said the mobile number led to a WhatsApp account that Hegseth appeared to have only recently deleted.
José Olivares
In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators are calling for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.
“This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together,” the Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski told the Hill.
The Trump administration has been facing criticism from Democrats – and now Republicans – after Monday’s embarrassing revelation that a team of senior national security officials accidentally added a journalist to a private group chat on Signal, an encrypted messaging app. The group, which included JD Vance, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and others, discussed sensitive plans to engage in military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
On Wednesday, morning the Atlantic posted another tranche of messages that contained details of the attack on Yemen, including descriptions of targets, launch times and even the details of weather during the assault.
Senior national security officials testified before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, where the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA director, John Ratcliffe, were grilled by lawmakers over the scandal. The national security officials said “no classified material” had been shared in the chat. Republicans are now calling for investigations, as well.
According to reporting from the Hill, top Republican senators are calling for various committees to investigate the leak, including the Senate armed services committee and the Senate intelligence committee. The Mississippi senator Roger Wicker, who chairs the armed services committee, told the Hill he would be asking the defense department’s inspector general to investigate the scandal.
Republican senators call for investigation of Signal scandal as messages released
Messages, released on Wednesday, from the Signal group chat discussing an attack on Yemen revealed details of US bombings, drone launches and other information about the assault, including descriptions of weather conditions and specific weapons.
“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” the Atlantic wrote.
It reproduced numerous messages from the text chat between the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth – who said on Tuesday that “nobody was texting war plans” – and top intelligence officials.
US intelligence chiefs on Wednesday denied breaking the law or revealing classified information in a group chat where they discussed details of airstrikes on Yemen in the presence of a journalist, despite allegations from Democrats that the leak was reckless and possibly illegal.
Democrats used an intelligence committee hearing on Wednesday to demand an explanation of how operational military plans are not classified information.
In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators called for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.
More on that in a moment, but first, here are some other developments:
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The private data of top security advisers to US President Donald Trump can be accessed online, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported, adding to the fallout from the Signal group chat scandal.
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Trump announced plans to impose sweeping 25% tariffs on cars from overseas on Wednesday, days before the president is expected to announce wide-ranging levies on other goods from around the world. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney called the move a “direct attack” on Canadian workers.
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The US supreme court upheld a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns” imposed by Joe Biden’s administration in a crackdown on firearms whose use has proliferated in crimes nationwide.
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The heads of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service testified in a heated congressional subcommittee hearing, helmed by conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene, amid a renewed Republican effort to defund US public media.
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Republican House speaker Mike Johnson suggested potentially defunding, restructuring or eliminating US federal courts as a means of pushing back against judicial decisions that have challenged Donald Trump’s policies.
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The Trump administration has paused the processing of certain green card applications as the US government continues to implement a hardline immigration agenda.
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Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student in Boston detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents in response to her pro-Palestinian activism, was on Wednesday evening being detained at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainee locator page.
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