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DONALD TRUMP HAS announced that he is nominating his national security advisor Mike Waltz to be the US Ambassador to the United Nations.
It comes after reports that Waltz was set to leave his position at the White House.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said: “I am pleased to announce that I will be nominating Mike Waltz to be the next United States Ambassador to the United Nations.”
The US President said Waltz had “worked hard to put our nation’s interests first” while serving as national security advisor.
He also confirmed that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as national security advisor “in the interim”.
Waltz, a former US Army special forces officer and three-term congressman from Florida, has been involved in several controversies since his appointment as national security advisor in November last year.
In March, he inadvertently added The Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief to a group chat on Signal, a commercially available messaging app, in which airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels were discussed.
Officials including Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used the chat to talk about details of the air strike timings and intelligence, unaware that the highly sensitive information was being simultaneously read by a member of the media.
Waltz told Fox News host Laura Ingraham last month that he took “full responsibility” for the breach, saying: “I built the group; my job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.”
The Pentagon inspector general’s office is now investigating Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app.
Trump had rejected calls to sack Waltz or Hegseth over the scandal, instead brandishing it a “witch hunt.” Last week, he denied that he was set to sack Hegseth after reports that he had also used Signal to discuss the Houthi strikes with his wife and others, dismissing the reports as “just fake news.”
It also emerged that Waltz and one of his senior aides have used Gmail for official communications, including military positions and weapons systems.
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