Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo
White House national security adviser Mike Waltz speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, February 21, 2025, in Oxon Hill, Maryland.
This week, The Atlantic published a stunning article on a group Signal chat that included the highest-ranking officials in the U.S. military and intelligence community, coordinating and executing a bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic and author of the article, was tagged into the chat by national security adviser Michael Waltz, a mistake that afforded the EIC a front-row seat to officials as high up as the secretary of defense and the vice president debating the decision. Once the attack plans for Yemen were revealed, Goldberg chose to remove himself from the group chat, and before reversing course after public backlash, he censored parts of the conversation on national-security grounds.
In a phone interview Tuesday with NBC News, President Trump appeared to defend his national security adviser, telling the press, “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” adding that “it was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”
Whether Waltz has fully learned his lesson seems to be more of an open question, especially given the Prospect’s discovery that his personal Venmo account remains public, with some 300 “friends” actively listed on his profile. And while Goldberg doesn’t appear in Waltz’s Venmo contact list, several other journalists do, according to a Prospect review.
Approximately ten minutes after requesting comment, Michael Waltz’s account disappeared from Venmo. Wired was the first to report the news.
In a statement, National Security Council spokesperson James Hewitt said, “NSA Waltz was previously a U.S. Congressman and Fox News contributor. He has relationships with people who work in media. There should be nothing surprising here.”
Like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, whose Venmo account I reported on several weeks ago, Waltz’s account was never set to private, showing hundreds of names who are likely in his phone as contacts, some of whom he may or may not have exchanged cash transfers with. Unlike Goldberg, we are not going to redact and revise this publicly available information.
What has remained largely unchallenged in the conversation surrounding the Atlantic article is the symbiotic relationship between senior government and military officials and their friends in the media. Having reviewed the now-unredacted information in the Signal exchange, it seems well within the realm of possibility that the bombing sequence would be shared simultaneously or directly after completion of the attack with a friendly news outlet—perhaps even The Atlantic—to score political points. This is part of the operational tactics of the Blob: the agglomeration of former generals, think-tankers, ex-officials, lobbyists, and the media, all working to present a clean narrative on national-security topics.
What sets this week’s incident apart is that the usually highly choreographed and invisible dance between reporter and reportee was laid bare for all to see. And Waltz’s Venmo shows that Goldberg is not the only reporter willing to partake in that dance with him. In addition to former members of Congress, think-tank scholars, and even the apparent winner of the Miss Florida pageant, Mike Waltz’s Venmo shows that partisan news media of both the left and the right routinely dip their beaks in the White House trough, as every major network reporter does to keep the redacted and highly massaged scoops pumping.
Unsurprisingly, Fox News holds the highest head count for reporters in Mike Waltz’s phone. Griff Jenkins, whose Fox.com bio lists him as “a Washington-based national correspondent for FOX News Channel (FNC) and as a co-anchor of FOX News Live,” is joined on the list by Brian Kilmeade, co-host of Fox & Friends. Porter Berry, president and editor in chief of Fox News Digital, also made the cut.
But right-wing reporters are not the only ones represented in Waltz’s Venmo list, which appears to be less than “clean on OPSEC,” as Secretary of Defense Hegseth wrote in the group chat leaked this week.
Leland Vittert, a national correspondent for NewsNation, is also listed on the digital account, as is Brianna Keilar, an American journalist who currently serves as co-anchor of the afternoon edition of CNN News Central, a network President Trump routinely decries as fake news.
Lauren Peikoff, an executive producer at MSNBC, is also in Waltz’s contacts. Earlier this year, Trump tweeted about the network: “Wow! Rachel Maddow has horrible ratings. She’ll be off the air very soon. MSNBC IS CLOSE TO DEATH. CNN HAS REACHED THE BOTTOM. This is a good thing. They are the Enemy of the People!”
But amidst the broadcasters, producers, and talking heads, one name stands out from the crowd: Judith Miller, who was summarily fired from The New York Times after it was revealed that her reporting on the Iraq War was categorically false and obtained almost verbatim from Vice President Dick Cheney. Her dismissal was the price paid for cozying up too close to an administration set on war, and viewing intelligence reports and basic facts with the same blood-hued glasses as those with their fingers on the button.
On Wednesday, Waltz told Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “I don’t know this guy,” in reference to Goldberg, adding, “I know him by his horrible reputation and he really is the bottom scum of journalists. I know him in the sense that he hates the president. But I didn’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone, and we’re gonna figure out how this happened.”
Waltz’s public Venmo tells a different story about the NSC chief’s willingness to engage in familiar spin in service of more war and carnage. After some prodding, Goldberg decided he had a green light to expose this game, which is played many times a day.
Published below is the full list of names for the public to review and reach their own conclusions from (scroll down PDF). Familiar names include Susan Wiles, Bernard Kerik, Kirstjen Nielsen, and Morgan Ortagus. Given that Waltz’s settings were set to public, any foreign adversary in the know already has this information. Average Americans with better things to do than sniff around Venmo don’t—until now.
