Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Waltz, is to leave his post—the first major departure of the president’s new term—after being embroiled in a scandal over a chat group leak.
Trump, in a social media post, said he would be nominating Waltz to be the next US ambassador to the United Nations, adding that “he has worked hard to put our nation’s interests first.”
Earlier in the day, sources said Trump had decided to force Waltz out of his White House position.
Trump’s selection of Marco Rubio to temporarily replace Waltz will mark the first time since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s that one person has held both the positions of secretary of state and national security adviser.
Mike Waltz and his deputy, Alex Won,g were both set to leave the White House.
The 51-year-old former congressman from Florida lasted just over 100 days of 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.”
Waltz had been under pressure since late March, when the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Magazine revealed he had been mistakenly added to a chat on the commercial messaging app Signal about military attacks on Yemen’s Huthi rebels.
Officials on the chat laid out the attack plan, including the timings that US warplanes would take off to bomb targets, with the first texts barely half an hour before they launched.
