President Donald Trump shared a key takeaway from his administration regarding the recent “Signalgate” incident. In an interview with The Atlantic, he remarked, “I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?” This statement refers to the messaging application that became part of a security breach discussion.
Trump advised, “If you want to know the truth, I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal, although it’s been used by a lot of people. But, whatever it is, I wouldn’t want to use it.”
Recently, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed that he was accidentally added to a Signal group chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, which included other officials discussing a U.S. military strategy involving Houthi rebels.
After the incident, Trump initially claimed he was unaware of the security breach but later defended Waltz and others, asserting there would be no dismissals over the matter. He described the scrutiny surrounding it as a “witch hunt” and expressed skepticism about Signal’s reliability, stating, “I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you.”
Signal, launched in 2014 as a nonprofit, end-to-end encrypted messaging platform, has recently faced misinformation regarding its security features. In response, Signal clarified that warnings about “vulnerabilities” were related to phishing scams targeting users, not the application’s core technology.