President Donald Trump said that he does not intend to fire anyone over the Signal chat incident in which a reporter was added to a group chat involving high ranking government officials prior to a military strike on Houthi terrorists in Yemen.

“I don’t fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts,” the president said in a weekend phone interview with NBC News.

When NBC News asked him if he still has confidence in Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth he said, “I do.”

“I think it’s just a witch hunt and the fake news, like you, talk about it all the time, but it’s just a witch hunt, and it shouldn’t be talked [about],” he said.

“We had a tremendously successful strike. We struck very hard and very lethal. And nobody wants to talk about that. All they want to talk about is nonsense. It’s fake news,” he said.

Trump has said that he is not familiar with the Signal app when he was asked if his team should have been using it.

“I have no idea what Signal is. I don’t care what Signal is,” he said on Saturday. “All I can tell you is it’s just a witch hunt, and it’s the only thing the press wants to talk about, because you have nothing else to talk about. Because it’s been the greatest 100-day presidency in the history of our country.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that no classified information was shared in the chat.

“The National Security Advisor has taken responsibility for this matter, and the National Security Council immediately said alongside the White House Counsel’s Office that they are looking into how a reporter’s number was inadvertently added to this messaging thread,” the press secretary said. “We have said all along that no classified material was sent on this messaging thread. There were no locations, no sources or methods revealed, and there were certainly no war plans discussed.”

“There’s arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg,” she said.

“Goldberg is an anti-Trump hater,” the press secretary said. “He is a registered Democrat. Goldberg’s wife is also a registered Democrat and a big Democrat donor who used to work under Hillary Clinton. This is the same Jeffrey Goldberg who infamously lied about weapons of mass destruction to get us into the Iraq War, which cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American soldiers.”

“And how else has Goldberg discredited himself?” she said. “By absurdly claiming that President Trump was Vladimir Putin during the 2016 campaign, by peddling the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax that tried to hijack President Trump’s first term, by inventing the ‘suckers and losers’ hoax to help Joe Biden in the 2020 election, by peddling a hoax about President Trump involving Gold Star families to help Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, which our campaign at the time, vigorously denied.”