German outlet reportedly finds Trump officials’ private contact info online

Ashleigh Fields
Wed, March 26, 2025 

THE HILL

German outlet reportedly finds Trump officials’ private contact info online


The German news outlet Der Spiegel reportedly found private contact information online for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and national security adviser Mike Waltz, who were involved in the Signal group chat security breach.

The Der Spiegel report said each individual’s email address and phone number were readily available on the dark web.

Hegseth’s mobile number and active email address were sent to Der Spiegel by a commercial provider of personal information for marketing purposes.

A search of the leaked user data revealed that the email address and, in some cases, even the password associated with it, could be found in more than 20 publicly accessible leaks and traced back to a WhatsApp account for the Defense secretary that was recently deleted, according to the outlet.

Waltz’s contact information was obtained by the same unnamed provider and was linked to his Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Signal accounts, in addition to several passwords for the adviser’s email address in leaked databases, Der Spiegel wrote.

Gabbard’s email address was found on Reddit and WikiLeaks with connections to her WhatsApp and Signal profiles. Ten other leaks revealed the same ping-backs.

The Hill reached out to Hegseth, Waltz and Gabbard for comment.

The discovery comes as legislators call on Hegseth and Waltz to resign over mistakenly adding The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat in which plans for U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis in Yemen were laid out.

President Trump described the breach as a “glitch” earlier in the week, after admitting Waltz learned a lesson about best practices for virtual communication. However, Trump also suggested the media was embellishing concerns about defense conversations on Signal’s platform, after some reporters accused the administration of brushing over the security breach.

“I don’t know about downplaying. The press up-plays it. I think it’s all a witch hunt,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. “The attacks were unbelievably successful, and that’s ultimately what you should be talking about, I think.”

Waltz and Hegseth maintain that classified information was not shared and are unsure how the journalist was added to the messaging chain.

“I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else,” Waltz told Fox News.


“Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out,” he added.

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Opinion

Top Trump Security Advisers’ Private Info Now Available Online

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
Wed, March 26, 2025 




If Mike Waltz knows anything about national security, he sure isn’t acting like it.

As it turns out, adding a journalist to a Signal channel in which top Trump administration officials discussed imminent airstrikes in Yemen isn’t the only security breach that’s occurred under Donald Trump’s national security adviser.

The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported Wednesday that several senior administration officials had their personal data—including account passwords, cell phone numbers, and email addresses—listed online.

Some of the compromised Cabinet members include Waltz, as well as National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The foreign publication was able to track down their information via commercial search engines as well as databases composed of hacked customer data.

“Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use,” reported Der Spiegel.

Through those details, reporters were further able to uncover Dropbox accounts and personal profiles on running apps that track users’ health data. Reporters were also able to locate WhatsApp and, ultimately, Signal accounts for some members of the administration.

“Hostile intelligence services could use this publicly available data to hack the communications of those affected by installing spyware on their devices,” the weekly news journal reported. “It is thus conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group in which Gabbard, Waltz, and Hegseth discussed a military strike.”

Former intelligence officials are warning that America’s adversaries “undoubtedly” already have the chat records. That’s thanks to the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who was physically in Russia when he was added to the chat on the retail app. In an interview with MeidasTouch Tuesday, former national security adviser Susan Rice said that Witkoff’s use of Signal while in Russia would have basically hand-delivered news of the attack to the Kremlin hours before it took place.

“Russians have whatever Witkoff was doing or saying on his personal cell phone,” Rice told the network.

But Witkoff wasn’t the only group chat member traveling abroad at the time. During a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, Gabbard admitted that she had been in the Indo-Pacific at the time that the strike was being coordinated over Signal, though despite her sudden recollection, she could not remember which country specifically she had been in before Yemen was hit.

She was reportedly in transit from Thailand to India on March 15, the day of the strike. Days later, Gabbard delivered a keynote address at the Raisina Dialogue, according to a readout from her office.




Trump’s Top Aides Suffer Another Series of Embarrassing Data Blunders

Yasmeen Hamadeh
Wed, March 26, 2025 

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images


When it rains, it pours—at least that’s the case for Mike Waltz and the country’s top national security officials this week.

After President Donald Trump’s national security adviser accidentally added a prominent journalist to a private Signal chat with more than a dozen top government officials, it emerged that he had made another digital blunder: leaving his Venmo friends list set to public.

And that’s not all. German news magazine Der Spiegel also reported Wednesday that it had found email addresses, mobile phone numbers, and even passwords belonging to a number of top Trump officials online. The information on Waltz, Defense Secretary Pege Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was reportedly available via commercial data-search services and showed up in several recent dumps of hacked data that ended up online.

Der Spiegel added that “most” of the numbers and emails it found appeared to still be in use, with some tied to accounts on social media sites like LinkedIn, Instagram, or messaging service WhatsApp.

The incidents this week have shone a massive spotlight on the administration’s seemingly shoddy data security practices, just a few months into Trump’s tenure.

Wired was the first to report Wednesday that Waltz still had a public Venmo profile—and that it was filled with prominent journalists.

The outlet claimed that the account, which used the name “Michael Waltz” and had a profile picture with Waltz in it, included a public 328-person friend list. Members on the list apparently ranged from media figures and journalists to colleagues within the Trump administration, like U.S. National Security Council staffer Walker Barrett.

Susie Wiles listens as Donald Trump speaks after being declared the winner during an election night watch party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida in the early hours of Wednesday, Nov. 06, 2024. / Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesMore

One notable member of the list was White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who seemingly also had her own public 182-person friend list filled with names like U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. Wired reports that none of Waltz’s or Wiles’ financial transactions were public on Venmo, but that it seemed that they had simply not selected to make their friend list private.

Though the White House apparently declined to comment on the Venmo accounts to Wired, the outlet claimed that Waltz’s and Wiles’ profiles went private shortly after they reached out.

In a statement to the Daily Beast, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: “Passwords and accounts associated with these reported leaks are as much as a decade old, and passwords have long been changed.”

On Monday, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published a viral report detailing the brief period he was inadvertently added to the Signal group chat, which existed to discuss then-upcoming military operations in Yemen.

The stunning incident and its aftermath has led many pundits and politicians on both sides of the aisle to question the Trump administration’s handling of potentially classified materials and digital security.