Politics
BREAKING: Key Trump Official Abruptly Resigns
A key member of President Donald Trump’s inner circle abruptly resigned on Thursday morning, setting off a cascade of online chatter about whether his involvement in the infamous Signalgate controversy played a role.
Michael Waltz, the former member of Congress who was tapped to serve as President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, is preparing to tender his resignation along with his deputy, insiders confirmed to multiple outlets. The news reverberated on cable news networks by late morning.
Sources told journalist Mark Halperin that Waltz and Alex Wong were expected to leave office by the end of the day, CBS reports.
Waltz first came under scrutiny after it was revealed that he accidentally invited a liberal editor of The Atlantic into a clandestine group chat containing some of the Trump administration’s most senior U.S. intelligence officials. They, along with Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were outlining preparations for a military strike on the Houthi rebels in Yemen later that day.
The reporter, Jeffrey Goldberg, published excerpts from the chat and forced the administration into a defensive crouch for multiple weeks. Waltz eventually accepted blame for including Goldberg, saying his iPhone errantly added the reporter’s number into the contact card of a staffer he intended to reach.
President Trump stood by Waltz at the time, telling reporters he is “a good man” who “learned a lesson.”
The source said the president’s mind has since changed, and he believes that sufficient time has passed that now the departure of Waltz and Wong can be framed as part of a broader reorganization of his leadership team. Until now, he has been hesitant to pressure both men to quit out of concern that it would appear as if media fallout were dictating his personnel changes.
Wong served in the first Trump administration as a deputy special representative for North Korea and later as a deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department. Trump has credited Wong for being instrumental in facilitating his visit to North Korea, the first by a sitting U.S. president in modern history.
