President Donald Trump's National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong will be leaving their posts, following a scandal in which a journalist was accidentally included on a chat between officials about air strikes on Yemen, CBS News reported on Thursday.
Waltz and his deputy Alex Wong were both set to leave, CBS News reported, while Fox News said Trump was expected to comment on the matter soon. The White House did not immediately comment.
A 51-year-old former Republican lawmaker from Florida, Waltz took criticism inside the White House when he was caught up in a March scandal involving a Signal chat among top Trump national security aides.
The former US congressman is the first major official to leave the administration in Trump's second term, which has so far been more stable in terms of personnel than his first.
A White House official did not confirm the reports, saying they "do not want to get ahead of any announcement," reported AFP.
Waltz had been under pressure since the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Magazine revealed in March that Waltz had mistakenly added him to a Signal app chat discussing plans of US airstrikes on Huthi rebels.
Officials on the chat laid out the attack plan including the timings that US warplanes would take off to bomb targets in Yemen, with the first texts barely half an hour before they launched.
Since then, the Trump administration has been trying to downplay the chat leak scandal, saying there was no war plan discussion in those messages, but now with the news of Waltz and hid deputy exiting the White House, it seems clear that the administration has acted tough.
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