Even some of President Donald Trump's allies are not pleased with how his administration is handling the fallout of inadvertently leaking its war plans to the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic earlier this month.
As Politico reports, the administration seems to have settled on a strategy of impugning the integrity of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally invited a join a group chat on messaging app Signal in which the administration posted specific details of an upcoming military strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Trump got the ball rolling earlier this week when he called Goldberg a "sleazebag" and Vice President J.D. Vance on Wednesday accused Goldberg of overhyping the revelations in the leaked war plans, which contained the precise times that strikes were scheduled to be carried out.
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However, one Trump ally who spoke with Politico described this strategy as "stupid" given that the central charges leveled by Goldberg -- namely, that Hegseth shared classified information over a group chat where a journalist who did not have clearance to see this information nonetheless gained access to it -- were accurate.
Even some Republicans in Congress are urging Trump and his team to take a more humble approach to messaging their way out of this scandal.
“I think the important thing is here they made a mistake, they know it,” said Sen. John Thune (R-SD). “They should own it and fix it so it never happens again.”
