Up until it was made private minutes after Wired asked the White House to comment on it, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz’s Venmo account displayed Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade, CNN’s Brianna Keilar and Kristen Holmes, an unnamed cable news producer, a “prominent national security reporter,” various local anchors, documentary filmmakers, plus MAGA conspiracy freak Ivan Raiklin, among other public figures as Waltz’s friends on the payment platform.

Wired doesn’t speculate over what if anything Waltz would’ve been using that platform to exchange cash with these figures for but instead asserts it’s most likely the case that when Waltz installed the app and set up an account in 2017 he imported his entire phone’s contact list as prompted. Venmo, owned by PayPal, added the option to hide friends in 2021 after Buzzfeed found that President Joe Biden was on someone’s list (whether he actually had a Venmo account is unclear but also pretty unlikely). But it’s an opt-out feature so public friend lists are still the default setting.

Wired gets into why this is a security vulnerability as the non-public figures on the list that Waltz interacted with in his regular life like doctors and real estate agents could be targeted by Chinese intel agents. It also further undermines Waltz’s bullshit line about never having met Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeff Goldberg (exposed as bullshit on Wednesday) by asserting he doesn’t talk to journalists.