Elon Musk tapped to help lead investigation into Signal chat leak: White House

Elon Musk is helping lead the investigation into the Signal chat leak involving top national security leaders and the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, White House press secretary Karonline Leavitt said Wednesday. 

“The National Security Council, the White House Counsel’s Office, and also, yes, Elon Musk’s team” will be leading the investigation into the Signal leak, Leavitt said during Wednesday’s White House press conference. 

“Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this, to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat — again, to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” she continued. 

The Trump administration is facing backlash from Democrats and other critics after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed in an article published Monday that he was added to a Signal group chat with top national security leaders, including national security advisor Mike Waltz, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. 

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Signal is an encrypted messaging app that operates similarly to texting or making phone calls, but with additional security measures that help ensure communications are kept private to those included in the correspondence. 

The Atlantic’s initial report characterized the Trump administration as texting “war plans” to one another. The Trump administration has maintained that no classified material was transmitted in the chat, with President Donald Trump defending Waltz amid the fallout. 

Trump revealed Tuesday that a member of Waltz’s office invited Goldberg to the chat, but did not provide additional information. 

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Waltz joined Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Tuesday, where he took responsibility for the inadvertent addition of Goldberg to the chat, arguing he believed the account belonged to someone else. 

“I built the group. My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated,” Waltz said. 

“Of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else,” Waltz added. “The person I thought was on there was never on there.”

Waltz also said during the interview that he had just spoken to Musk about the matter and that the “best technical minds” would look into it. 

Musk is helping lead the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been poring through federal agencies in search of government overspending, fraud and mismanagement. 

“If this story proves anything, it proves that Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well,” Leavitt continued. “And there’s arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg.”

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Following Monday’s report in The Atlantic concerning the Signal chat, Goldberg published a Wednesday follow-up story that included messages directly from the chat. The article notably did not characterize the correspondence as “war plans,” instead opting to refer to them as “attack plans” in the headline. 

The Trump administration responded that the follow-up story proved that there were “no war plans” in the correspondence, taking a victory lap that the story was exposed to be a “hoax.” 

“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans,'” Leavitt posted to X on Wednesday morning. “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

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Waltz posted to X on Wednesday, “No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS. Foreign partners had already been notified that strikes were imminent. BOTTOM LINE: President Trump is protecting America and our interests.” 

A spokesperson for The Atlantic defended that the outlet did expose a “war plan” in its Wednesday report, pointing Fox News Digital to a screenshot included in the piece of Hegseth’s messages related to F-18s and drone strikes that were accompanied by timestamps for the operation. 

“If this information — particularly the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen — had fallen into the wrong hands in that crucial two-hour period, American pilots and other American personnel could have been exposed to even greater danger than they ordinarily would face,” the report stated. 

Leavitt said during the press conference that Signal is an “approved app” for government employees, citing that the “CIA has it loaded onto government phones because it is the most secure and efficient way to communicate.”