WASHINGTON, DC (Michigan News Source) – A political grenade rolled into the Trump White House this week when The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published excerpts from a private Signal chat among senior Trump administration officials – chat logs he claimed revealed top-secret “war plans” concerning an attack on Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen who have been targeting commercial ships in the Red Sea.

White House officials quickly pushed back, pointing out that no actual plans were leaked. In response, Goldberg published the full logs – hidden behind The Atlantic’s paywall, naturally.

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Curiously, there has been a collective yawn in the mainstream media about who actually added Goldberg to the Signal chat. For all the noise about national security, very few have seemed interested in who threw the digital doors open.

Goldberg says the National Security Adviser invited him in.

In a lengthy interview with Goldberg and published in The Atlantic, it was reported that he got a Signal message from a user identified as National Security Adviser “Michael Waltz” inviting him to something called the “Houthi PC small group” (PC stands for Principals Committee, a senior-level interagency group). Goldberg said he then got a message from Mike Waltz talking about how he’s “putting together this PC small group to talk about the Houthis, because something’s gonna be happening over the next 72 hours.” It was only when the strike happened that Goldberg realized that the text chat was real and not some elaborate spoof on him like he had originally thought.

The fallout and blame has been aimed at those at the top.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard continue to be in the crosshairs of the Left’s faux outrage machine, with demands for resignations flying fast. But something smells off. The question isn’t just what was leaked – it’s also how. And why the secrecy about the whole thing?

So, who was in this now-infamous group chat?

Wired Magazine and some other outlets including CBS News have reported that they have a list of the 18 people in the Signal Chat in addition to Goldberg. It included: National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Deputy National Security Adviser Alex Wong (who is also an Assistant to the president), and Joe Kent (Head of the National Counterterrorism Center.)

Others in the chat, according to media outlets include: Brian McCormack, Chief of Staff for the NSC; Walker Barrett, National Security Council Staffer; Michael Needham, Counselor and Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State; Dan Katz, Chief of Staff at the Treasury Department, “SM” who is believed to be Trump adviser Stephen Miller and unidentified participant, Jacob – who no one is in a hurry to identify either.

Wong, outed by Laura Loomer. Kind of.

Enter independent investigative journalist Laura Loomer, known for her trademark blend of breaking scoops and sometime issues with accuracy. She has alleged on X that Alex Wong was the one who added Goldberg to the Signal chat group. While many in the press have dismissed Loomer’s exclusive reporting as mere gossip, it is possible to verify the details she revealed about the career histories and family ties of Wong and his wife.

Trump says it’s a Waltz staffer.

And although at this time it can’t be confirmed whether Wong was indeed the one who added Goldberg to the chat, Trump himself said it was a staffer for Waltz when he did an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly. He also told NBC, “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”

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Waltz, for his part, has accepted full responsibility. While doing an interview with Laura Ingraham of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, he said, “I take full responsibility. I built the group… my job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.” However, he’s given conflicting accounts of how the addition of Goldberg actually happened and who did it. And a newly released text thread shows Waltz saying that Wong is the one who set up a “tiger team.”

It doesn’t appear that Waltz is the one who added Goldberg considering what he also said to Ingraham in the interview: “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but of all the people out there, somehow this guy who has lied about the president, who has lied to Gold Star families, lied to their attorneys, and gone to Russia, hoax, gone to just all kinds of lengths to lie and smear the president United States, and he’s the one that somehow gets on somebody’s contact and then get sucked into this group.” His use of the word “somehow” doesn’t exactly suggest that Waltz is the one doing the adding of people into the group.

Another contradiction.

CBS News reports, with no named sources, that Waltz added Goldberg to the Signal chain and that Wong wasn’t involved in setting up the chat. Yes, everyone’s got their own version of what happened – or two – and named sources have become an endangered species.

Swamp credentials with a side of suspicion.

For now, the chatter about Wong being the one who added Goldberg to the Signal chat remains just that – chatter. Whether it was a calculated move or a clumsy slip, we may never know. But one thing’s certain: Wong’s résumé is long, and let’s just say, his past work and familial ties comes with more than a few raised eyebrows.

In addition to Trump, Wong also worked under George W. Bush on foreign policy, was a Romney campaign alum, and spent time at Covington & Burling – the law firm blacklisted by Trump in an executive order for providing free legal work to special counsel Jack Smith. As Politico explains, “Burling provided free legal services to special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two criminal cases against Trump.” Not great optics.

Alex Wong’s wife, Candice Chiu Wong, is an Assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C., and is tied to the January 6th prosecutions according to past articles from Newsweek and Fox News. She was appointed by Biden to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. During confirmation, she admitted potential conflicts of interest because she intended to remain at the DOJ in her role overseeing violent crime and trafficking while simultaneously serving on the Sentencing Commission.

Candice also clerked for Obama-appointed Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who was the officiant at her wedding to Alex.

Then there’s Candice’s father, the late Dr. Ya-Hui Chiu, who spent over two decades at AsiaSat, a Hong Kong-based satellite firm partly owned by China’s state-run CITIC Group. According to his obituary, he helped launch satellites from China to Kazakhstan. Loomer claims these satellites supported China’s military-linked enterprises. These claims are also verified by articles that show that AsiaSat has indirectly supported Chinese military activities by leasing satellite bandwidth to state telecom firms and entities like the Ministry of State Security, which have used it for operations in the South China Sea and to suppress protests in Tibet and Xinjiang. This is according to The Wall Street Journal (April 23, 2019) and The Jamestown Foundation (February 11, 2021).

Senator Cotton’s blind spot?

Wong’s biggest booster? Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. Wong once served as Cotton’s foreign policy adviser. Charlie Kirk of the Charlie Kirk Show, a nationally syndicated conservative talk radio program on Real American’s Voice, talked about Wong and Cotton on his radio show on Thursday. You can see Kirk talking about Wong here. He added that “Mike Waltz still has a ton of Biden holdovers in the Trump national security office.”

Kirk also points out Senator Cotton got on X pretty quickly on Thursday to defend Wong. You can see his post below.

The silence is deafening – except from Trump.

At the end of the day, Donald Trump’s explanation of what happened seems more believable than the accounts of Goldberg, the left-wing media, unnamed sources, and even members of Trump’s own administration, including Waltz.

Whether Goldberg was added to the chat through sabotage or sheer stupidity is anyone’s guess. But here’s the real question: why hasn’t Wong – or anyone – been publicly named or fired over this mess? Sure, Waltz took the heat, but shouldn’t the person who actually hit “add to chat” face some consequences? And shouldn’t heads roll, starting with Waltz and whoever botched the job?

Intentional or not, this was a serious security breach, and those responsible need to be shown the door. The Trump administration can’t afford to shrug this off. The political sharks are already circling, and this leak just turned the water red – handing ammunition to both foreign enemies and domestic vultures itching to bring the president down and take the country with him.