The declaration from the White House that the case is closed on Signalgate is receiving pushback in Congress, including from some Republicans.
Early last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “This case has been closed here at the White House, as far as we are concerned,” adding that “Mike Waltz continues to be an important part of his national security team.”
Trump’s National Security Adviser Waltz was responsible for the creation of the Signal chat that saw Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg added to the guest list alongside senior Trump officials who shared highly sensitive information about American strikes in Yemen.
Despite the White House’s best attempts to brush the incident off as nothing, several lawmakers still want to pursue the issue. When questioned by The Hill, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) noted that the inspector general for the Department of Defense’s investigation was ongoing.
Rounds called the White House’s assertion that the chat mix-up can “never happen again” “hopeful messaging” but added, “We’ll wait and see what the inspector general for the DOD says.”
He continued, “It’s already ongoing. We already requested it—the committee did on a bipartisan basis—and we’ll look at it on a bipartisan basis.”
Fellow Republican Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) also recently informed national security leaders that he had additional questions on the matter, telling The Hill, “All concerns haven’t been addressed. So there will be more to be learned going forward.”
House Democrats have also pushed for outside review elsewhere across the government, with Senate intelligence committee vice chair Mark Warner (D-VA) writing in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal that the “Signal story is far from a closed case.”
Warner also referenced conversations he had with loved ones of service members deployed on the aircraft carrier that carried out the strikes in Yemen who were incensed at the risk Waltz’s chat put their family members in. Warner concluded, “They have a right to be angry and a right to some answers. We owe them nothing less.”
The Trump administration has only doubled down on their insistence that there’s nothing more to talk about, with Trump telling reporters who asked whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would face investigation on Thursday, “Don’t bring that up again… It’s such a wasted story.”
Meanwhile, it has since emerged that Waltz had at least 20 other Signal chats relating to various crises around the world, designed to discuss events in Ukraine, Gaza, China, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
One source told POLITICO, “Waltz built the entire NSC communications process on Signal,” while a spokesperson for the National Security Council told the outlet, “Any claim of use for classified information is 100 percent untrue.”
Legal experts have suggested that the inadvertent sharing of national defense information with Goldberg would likely constitute a violation of the Espionage Act, while usage of the disappearing message function (which Waltz had enabled) would be a violation of public records laws.
