WASHINGTON — Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg is accusing Mike Waltz of mendacity about speaking with him — ridiculing on Sunday the declare that his telephone quantity was mysteriously “sucked into” the nationwide safety adviser’s cellphone earlier than being included in a Sign group chat about Yemen airstrikes.
“This isn’t ‘The Matrix’. Telephone numbers don’t simply get sucked into different telephones,” The Atlantic journal’s editor in chief stated in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.
“I don’t know what he’s speaking about there. You realize, very ceaselessly in journalism, the obvious rationalization is the reason. My telephone quantity was in his telephone as a result of my telephone quantity is in his telephone.”
Waltz, a former Florida congressman, claimed final week that he’s by no means spoken with or met Goldberg — a outstanding critic of President Trump — though a viral picture exhibits the lads standing collectively at a 2021 occasion.
“He’s telling everybody that he’s by no means met me or spoken to me. That’s simply merely not true,” Goldberg stated.
“I perceive why he’s doing it. However you already know, this has change into a considerably farcical state of affairs. There’s no subterfuge right here. My quantity was in his telephone. He mistakenly added me to the group chat. There we go.”
Goldberg didn’t elaborate on his alleged prior contacts with Waltz.
Nationwide Safety Council spokesman Brian Hughes denied Goldberg’s declare.
“Mike doesn’t know Jeffrey Goldberg and doesn’t recall ever assembly him,” Hughes instructed The Submit.
“As a Member of Congress, he met hundreds of individuals at dozens upon dozens of public occasions. Goldberg has a protracted historical past of faulty reporting and baseless assaults in opposition to the President and Trump administration officers. I’ll take the phrase of a adorned Inexperienced Beret, fight veteran over Jeffrey Goldberg on daily basis of the week.”
Goldberg was invited by Waltz on March 11 to a Sign messaging chat known as “Houthi PC small group,” wherein Trump officers mentioned preparations for March 15 airstrikes on Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi motion, which has been attacking ships within the Purple Sea.
Waltz claimed Tuesday that Goldberg’s quantity was “sucked into” his telephone and that “I’ve by no means met, don’t know” and “by no means communicated with” the author.
Many Trump allies doubt that the nationwide safety adviser is telling the reality, however Trump and his high White Home aides have publicly backed Waltz to disclaim Democrats a “scalp,” and he joined Vice President JD Vance Friday on a visit to Greenland.
White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt final week stated that Goldberg “lied” about weapons of mass destruction forward of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and highlighted his disputed 2020 article accusing Trump of disparaging US troops buried in France as “suckers” and “losers.”
Trump denied saying so, however the allegation was cited as reality by Democrats.
Goldberg claimed in that article that Trump “blamed rain for the last-minute determination” to cancel a cemetery go to close to Paris in 2018 by “saying that ‘the helicopter couldn’t fly’ and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there” and that “[n]both declare was true.”
Navy information confirmed that army personnel made a “dangerous climate name” that canceled the helicopter flight. Goldberg by no means corrected his story.
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