National security adviser Mike Waltz said Tuesday that he is taking “full responsibility” for the inclusion of a journalist in a group chat discussing war plans.

But first, he trashed The Atlantic editor who was included in the chat, denied any knowledge of how it happened and promised that Elon Musk would investigate along with other Trump administrators.

Waltz’s remarks on Fox News came as he labors under heavy criticism for including The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on the chat, and as President Donald Trump defended his security adviser.

“I built the group. My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated,” Waltz said on Fox News with Laura Ingraham.

Waltz denied knowing Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, saying that he “wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him or saw him in a police lineup.” He then spent a greater chunk of the interview listing off his criticisms of The Atlantic’s coverage, accusing the publication – without evidence – of lying about Gold Star military families and the Russia “hoax.”

“I can tell you 100 percent I don’t know this guy,” Waltz said. Then, deploying a tactic long used by Trump and his allies of attacking the media, he called him “the bottom scum of journalists.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for The Atlantic said, “Attempts to disparage and discredit The Atlantic, our editor, and our reporting follow an obvious playbook by elected officials and others in power who are hostile to journalists and the First Amendment rights of all Americans. Our journalists are continuing to fearlessly and independently report the truth in the public interest.”

In a bombshell report in The Atlantic on Monday, Goldberg described being added to the encrypted conversation, presumably inadvertently, after receiving “a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz.”

In their interview, Ingraham pressed Waltz on how Goldberg could have ended up on the group chat.

“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number?” Waltz told Ingraham. When she asked again how he ended up on Waltz’s phone, Waltz again denied knowing.

“Of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else,” Waltz added. “The person I thought was on there was never on there.”

Waltz declined to say who he believed was on the chat when he first created it. He also did not say who was supposed to be added to the chat instead of Goldberg.

He defended the U.S. attack on Houthis and the planning process, maintaining no classified information was included in the group chat. But he admitted that the chat being made public was “embarrassing.”

He echoed Trump’s earlier comments that it would be ideal if sensitive national security conversations could all happen in person, but said that isn’t always possible. Ultimately, he said, what was revealed in the chat was a “healthy policy debate.”

The report was followed by swift backlash from Democrats who denounced the breach of national security information and called the leak a result of incompetency from the Trump administration, and specifically by Waltz and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Waltz defended Hegseth, saying he’s been an “excellent secretary of Defense.”

Waltz said that he had just spoken with Musk and that they have the “best technical minds” looking at how this happened.

“We made a mistake. We’re moving forward,” Waltz said.