Trump blames ‘employee’ for Signalgate in Newsmax interview: Live

The vice president has said he will join his wife Usha on her trip to Greenland this week, suggesting in an online video that global security is at stake.

Vance will join the delegation in visiting the U.S. Space Base at Pituffik in the north of the Arctic territory, as Trump continues to put pressure on Denmark about acquiring it for the United States..

“We’re going to check out how things are going there,” Vance said in a video posted to social media.

“A lot of other countries have threatened Greenland, have threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada, and of course, to threaten the people of Greenland. So we are going to check out how things are going there.

“Unfortunately, leaders in both America and in Denmark, I think, ignored Greenland for far too long.”

The president signed yet another order on Tuesday, this one requiring the public to prove they are U.S. citizens before they are allowed to vote and attempting to prevent states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day.

The sweeping order also seeks to take federal funding away from states that do not comply.

Trump has long questioned the U.S. electoral system and continues to falsely claim that his 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud.

The president and his Republican allies also have made baseless claims about widespread voting by non-citizens, which is illegal and, in fact, rarely occurs.

Last year, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a bill that would ban non-citizens from registering to vote in federal elections, a practice that is already illegal. It did not pass the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats.

The White House’s order seeks to achieve similar goals. Voting rights groups argued that it, like the aforementioned Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act that did not become law, would disenfranchise voters, particularly people of color, who do not have access to passports or other required identification.

“We’ve got to straighten out our elections,” Trump said as he signed the order at the White House.

“This country is so sick because of the elections, the fake elections and the bad elections, we’re going to straighten that out one way or the other.”

The order, like so many of his others, is likely to draw legal challenges.

In an interview of his own with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, the under-fire Waltz said he was solely to blame for the Signalgate debacle, struggling to explain how Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the top secret chat if, as the security official claimed, he had never spoken to him and did not have his number.

Even the ever-obliging Ingraham appeared to be having trouble making sense of Waltz’s excuses.

Here’s more from Josh Marcus.

Also in last night’s interview with Greg Kelly on the conservative cable news channel, the president agreed that George Soros and his ilk were “probably involved” in the spate of arson attacks on Elon Musk’s Tesla dealerships in recent weeks, without offering any evidence for the claim whatsoever.

Mike Bedigan has more on this one too.

Donald Trump has shifted the blame for a major security blunder in which details of U.S. military operations in Yemen were leaked to a journalist on a secret group chat to an unidentified “lower level” White House employee that worked for his National Security Adviser Michael Waltz.

Trump offered the new theory in an interview on Newsmax Tuesday evening on how Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, ended up on the Signal group chat in which the top-secret plans were discussed.

“What it was, we believe, is somebody that was on the line with permission, somebody that was with Mike Waltz, worked for Mike Waltz at a lower level, had, I guess, Goldberg’s number or called through the app, and somehow this guy ended up on the call,” the president said.

Here’s more from Mike Bedigan.

One day after the revelation of a shocking security breach from top Trump administration officials, the White House is digging in and hoping it can convince Americans to dismiss the unprecedented lapse as media-driven partisan squabbling even as Democrats are calling for resignations.

Eric Garcia, on Capitol Hill, and Andrew Feinberg, at the White House, filed this report.

Editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, released excerpts of the conversation among national security officials on the messaging app Signal after he was accidentally added to the group chat — exercising a right to publish that has sparked controversy among Trump administration officials.

Ariana Baio takes a look at the legal questions that have arisen.

According to NBC News, at least 80 attacks have been reported against Tesla vehicles since Musk began gutting the federal government through his Department of Government Efficiency in January.

During a hearing Tuesday, committee vice chair Mark Warner grilled intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard and slammed national security adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after they failed to conduct “security hygiene 101” without realizing The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was included in the text chain.

Alex Woodward watched the hearing.