'Bad signal': CNN reporter questions whether Trump understands key element of chat scandal
March 26, 2025
President Donald Trump's rambling response to a question about the group chat scandal suggests he doesn't fully understand key elements of the case, according to a reporter.
The Atlantic published new details Wednesday morning about the war plans disclosed by defense secretary Pete Hegseth in a chat on the Signal app that included high-level government official and the magazine's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was included by apparent mistake by national security adviser.
"As for the president, he appeared on [The Vince Podcast] this morning, and he said there was nothing that was released that was classified, nothing that was compromised," said CNN's Jeff Zeleny. "But he also sounds like he's alarmed by actually how this came about. Also, not exactly sure what Signal may be."
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Signal is a commercially available encrypted app that the Pentagon has cautioned employees not to use because it's vulnerable to hackers, and its automatic deletion of messages could violate government records requirements, but Trump used the word in another context.
"Somebody in my group either screwed up or it's a bad signal," the president told the podcaster. "You know, it's a bad signal, happens to, but it seems to be maybe he came in with a staffer and it was by accident. So what we could tell, we'll know pretty much today, I think, but we have some pretty good guys checking out the phones. But it's something that is not a big deal other than you want to find out who did it and how they did it, because you don't want to happen, you know, in the future. You can't have that happen."
Zeleny suspected that Trump wasn't entirely sure how the Signal app works.
"So it seemingly sounding like, talking [about] a different kind of signal, like a telephone signal," Zeleny said. "Of course, this is a messaging app, but never mind all that. The bottom line, here is the White House and the president are pushing back against all of this criticism. Of course, they're taking a familiar a page out of the Trump playbook and blaming the messenger and The Atlantic. But behind all of that, there are still many questions here about how Jeffrey Goldberg got added on to this group conversation."
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