US National Security Advisor Mike Walz and other members of the White House National Security Council (NSC) are using Gmail for official correspondence, the Washington Post reported, citing its sources.
According to them, Walz used Google's email service to send his schedule, work documents and other files. “Using a personal email, even for unclassified material, is risky, given that foreign intelligence agencies attach extreme importance to the correspondence and schedules of senior government officials, such as the national security assistant,“ the newspaper wrote.
Waltz also created groups on the Signal messenger to discuss the situation in Somalia and the progress of military operations in Ukraine, one of the sources told The Washington Post.
NSC spokesman Brian Hughes denied the information, noting that Waltz and his colleagues use only specialized encrypted platforms for their work correspondence. “Waltz has not sent and will not send classified information in this manner,” Hughes said.
Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published a scandalous article on March 24, in which he reported that on March 11 he received an invitation to connect to the Signal messenger from a user named Mike Waltz. Two days later, the journalist received a notification that he had been added to a group chat in which members of the US administration were discussing strikes on Yemen. According to the journalist, on March 15, a user under the pseudonym Pete Hegseth (the name of the US Secretary of Defense) posted a message detailing the upcoming strikes against the Houthis and the expected start date of the operation, which, according to Goldberg, coincided with the time of the first social media messages about the attack. On March 15, the United States, on Trump's orders, began carrying out massive airstrikes on Houthi targets, who control about a third of Yemen.
The US Democratic Party considers the Signal data leak a major mistake by the Republican Trump administration. There are calls in the US Congress and among the American expert community for the dismissal of Walz and other members of the presidential team.