Trump, intel chiefs dismiss chat breach

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump and top US intelligence officials raced on Tuesday to stem a growing scandal after a journalist was accidentally added to a group chat about air strikes on Yemen´s Huthi rebels in a stunning security breach.

Trump brushed off the leak as a “glitch,” while the CIA director and the White House intelligence chief both claimed during a Senate hearing that no classified information was divulged in the conversation on the Signal messaging app.

The president also defended his National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who added Atlantic´s magazine´s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat by mistake ahead of the airstrikes. Trump told broadcaster NBC that the breach was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.” Waltz “has learned a lesson, and he´s a good man,” he added.

Trump´s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe -- who were both reported to be in the chat -- both endured a stormy Senate Intelligence Committee hearing over the leak.

“There was no classified material that was shared,” Gabbard, who has previously caused controversy with comments sympathetic to Russia and Syria, told the committee. She refused however to comment on whether Signal had been installed on her personal phone.

Ratcliffe confirmed he was involved in the Signal group and had the app installed on his work computer, but said the communications were “entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”