Trump unwilling to fire Waltz or others involved in Signal chat leak, officials say

President publicly supporting national security adviser to avoid admitting fault in security blunder, say sources

Donald Trump has been unwilling to fire the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, or his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, over the now infamous Signal group chat because doing so would be a tacit admission of fault and seen as handing a victory to the Atlantic magazine, officials close to the president said.

The president has been less interested in the possibility of the plans having been classified or the fact that they were shared in an unclassified commercial app, than the fact that Waltz had the number of the editor-in-chief of a magazine that Trump despises, the officials said.