Mike Waltz Left His Venmo Friends List Public

WIRED

26-03-2025

Dhruv Mehrotra Tim Marchman Mar 26, 2025 4:44 PM A WIRED review shows national security adviser Mike Waltz, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and other top officials left sensitive information exposed via Venmo—until WIRED asked about it. Photograph:A Venmo account under the name 'Michael Waltz,' carrying a profile photo of the national security adviser and connected to accounts bearing the names of people closely associated with him, was left open to the public until Wednesday afternoon. A WIRED analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz's personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others—information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends, experts say.
Among the accounts linked to 'Michael Waltz' are ones that appear to belong to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Walker Barrett, a staffer on the United States National Security Council. Both were fellow participants in a now-infamous Signal group chat called 'Houthi PC small group.'
The White House declined to comment after being presented with WIRED's findings, but the accounts appearing to belong to Waltz and Wiles went fully private following WIRED's inquiry.
Earlier this week, The Atlantic reported that an account with the name 'Michael Waltz' accidentally invited the publication's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the chat, in which senior administration officials discussed plans for a strike on Yemen. (Waltz told Fox News' Laura Ingraham he takes 'full responsibility' for inviting Goldberg, adding, 'We have some of the best technology minds looking at how this happened.') Over the encrypted messaging app, which Department of Defense guidelines bar from being used for the discussion of any non-public defense information, the group debated whether a strike should be carried out at all. Hours after an account with the name of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared missile targets, strike timing, and other highly sensitive operational details of a coming strike, US forces bombed Houthi targets in Yemen, reportedly killing at least 53 people.
A WIRED review of public data exposed on Venmo accounts associated with senior administration officials suggests that the Signal group chat was not an isolated mistake, but part of a broader pattern of what national security experts describe as reckless behavior by some of the most powerful people in the US government.
The Venmo account under Waltz's name includes a 328-person friend list. Among them are accounts sharing the names of people closely associated with Waltz, such as Barrett, formerly Waltz's deputy chief of staff when Waltz was a member of the House of Representatives, and Micah Thomas Ketchel, former chief of staff to Waltz and currently a senior adviser to Waltz and President Donald Trump.
Other accounts carry the names of a wide range of media figures, from on-air personalities like Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade of Fox News and Brianna Keilar and Kristen Holmes of CNN to a cable news producer, a prominent national security reporter, local news anchors, documentarians, and noted conspiracy theorist Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself the 'the secretary of retribution,' and once created a deep state target list. (Fox News declined to comment; CNN did not respond to a request for comment.)
Many of the accounts appear to belong to local and national politicians and political operatives ranging from US Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas to a former mayor of Deltona, Florida, as well as venture capitalists, defense industry entrepreneurs, and executives like Christian Brose, the president of defense tech giant Anduril. (Crenshaw's office and Anduril did not respond to requests for comment.)
One of the most notable appears to belong to Wiles, one of Trump's most trusted political advisers. The account's 182-person friend list includes accounts sharing the names of influential figures like Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, and Hope Hicks, Trump's former White House communications director.
While none of the Venmo transactions for the account listed for Waltz, Wiles, or Barrett were publicly visible, it appears that none of them had opted out of sharing their contact list, allowing their friend lists to remain visible to the public. After WIRED reached out to the White House for comment, both Waltz and Wiles appeared to change their Venmo privacy settings to hide their friend lists.
In a statement, Venmo spokesperson Erin Mackey says, 'We take our customers' privacy seriously, which is why we let customers choose their privacy settings on Venmo for both their individual payments and friends lists —and we make it incredibly simple for customers to make these private if they choose to do so.' The comment is nearly identical to the one Venmo provided to WIRED in response to a 2024 story about now-Vice President JD Vance's Venmo.
Last July, WIRED reported that Vance had left his Venmo account public, exposing a network of connections to Project 2025 architects, DOJ officials, Yale Law classmates, and far-right media figures. (While it was not reported at the time, WIRED's analysis of that public Venmo account—and the networks of his listed friends—found that the Michael Waltz Venmo account appeared in Vance's extended network, comprising friends and friends of friends.) According to The Atlantic, Vance was also an active participant in the Signal chat alongside Waltz, where he questioned whether the planned military operation in Yemen aligned with President Trump's broader message on Europe.
When the Michael Waltz account was set up in 2017, the app would display a prompt allowing users to sync their phone contacts, automatically populating their friends list with anyone in their address book already using the platform. Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized this design, arguing that it exposes users to unnecessary risks by making social connections public by default. It wasn't until BuzzFeed News revealed in 2021 that then-president Joe Biden was easily found on the app that Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, added the option to hide friend lists. But that setting remains opt-in. According to its privacy policy, unless users proactively change their privacy settings, their network remains visible to anyone.
Mixed in with the high-profile names connected to the apparent Waltz Venmo account, which was created in 2017, are a number of accounts appearing to belong to ordinary people, such as several doctors, real estate agents, and a tailor. These are the kinds of low-level connections that, experts say, spies look at for basic information—a relationship with a medical specialist could expose that a person is being treated for an illness that hasn't been made public—as well as patterns, pressure points, or a way in. Experts call them 'soft targets': people who have access but aren't protected.
For instance, when the US and Israel reportedly sabotaged Iran's nuclear program with the Stuxnet virus, they used a control engineer's USB stick, not one belonging to a senior official. Chinese intelligence has used similar tactics, contacting thousands of foreign citizens using LinkedIn, or going after university students to get closer to US researchers and companies. While WIRED has found no evidence that foreign adversaries have used Venmo to target a US politician's network, the platform makes these relationships visible—potentially giving adversaries a searchable map of the people around power.
'The first thing you think of is the counterintelligence issue, right? And the security vulnerabilities. It kind of boggles the mind, in a way,' says Michael Ard, a former intelligence analyst who now runs the masters program in intelligence analysis at Johns Hopkins. 'It would be really easy for somebody to spoof a contact, and that is something the security industry has already been issuing notices on.'
Waltz has spent years inside the Republican national security establishment. A former Green Beret—something reflected in the number of apparent veteran Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other special operators to whom the Venmo account bearing his name is connected—he served as a defense adviser at the Pentagon under former defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, and later counseled Vice President Dick Cheney on counterterrorism. In 2020, following the US drone strike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Waltz says he was part of a small group of lawmakers privately briefed at the White House.
Another participant in that thread was Hegseth. A public Venmo account under his name, identified by The American Prospect in February, revealed a similarly elite network—including names matching executives at defense firms like Palantir and Anduril, as well as lobbyists and George W. Bush-era officials. In the Signal chat, the defense secretary directly responded to Vance's concerns: 'VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It's PATHETIC.'
Both Vance and Hegseth's Venmo accounts have since been deleted.
Jake Lahut contributed reporting.