By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Two months into the second Trump administration, the
almost daily flood of stories surrounding the president’s mad dash to sharply
alter the trajectory of United States’ foreign, economic, and domestic policy
threatens to drown us in a sea of “news.” Executive orders, foreign policy
negotiations, tariff gyrations, DOGE antics, and social media meltdowns — it
becomes more and more difficult to determine which stories matter and which are
distractions. But sometimes a story comes along that is such an authentic,
undeniable disgrace that no possible defense of it can be mustered.
So, let’s talk about how National Security Adviser Mike
Waltz accidentally added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a top
secret discussion among the highest-ranking principals in the Trump
administration on Signal, a reasonably (but not perfectly) secure private
texting platform. There, these people — including Vice President Vance, Marco Rubio,
Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and others — were candidly debating one of the
most classified matters imaginable: the value and timing of a strike on Yemen’s
Houthi terrorists, who have been wreaking havoc on international shipping in
the Red Sea for years now and recently re-escalated their efforts. After a
decision was made to hit them, Secretary of Defense Hegseth then sent extremely
detailed military strike plans on that channel to the rest of its participants
— including the editor in chief of one of the most Trump-hostile media outlets
in America. It is a shocking failure of professional duty and responsibility,
almost staggering in the magnitude of its carelessness.
Read Goldberg’s piece, all of it. I suspect far too few will, because they
would prefer to dismiss it as the product of an inveterate anti-Trump liar who authored the infamous claim that Trump
had said American soldiers were “losers” and “suckers” for dying for their
country. Don’t bother with that this time: Goldberg’s piece has already been
confirmed by the Wall Street Journal and the
federal government. (NSC spokesman Brian Hughes: “At this time, the message
thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an
inadvertent number was added to the chain.”) Anybody who’s affecting disbelief
reveals himself to be willing to deny reality for vulgar partisan reasons.
Two people obviously bear immediate responsibility for
this massive security failure. First is Mike Waltz, who accidentally brought
Goldberg into the conversation, according to the report. Second — depressingly,
because he comes across well in the leaked texts — is Pete Hegseth, for
publishing highly classified near-term military strike plans on a channel that,
unbeknownst to him, included an outsider. To say that both need remedial work
in tradecraft is the understatement of the year: A mistake like this from a
lesser staffer would have resulted in the immediate revocation of security
clearances, and potential prosecution as well. (And not even lesser staffers: I
still remember the downfalls of John Deutch and David Petraeus, after all.)
But there is a far more important question that few are
asking: Why was this conversation being conducted on Signal at all? I
know the answer, and it reflects terribly on everyone involved in this
conversation, simply because of their willing participation. For those unaware:
The only logical reason for top-ranking government officials to conduct highly
classified national security discussions on a privately owned communications
platform would be to avoid later legal discovery of those discussions by
investigators. By keeping these discussions to a secret, nongovernment email
server, they control and, if necessary, can delete the information. The risk of
accidentally exposing classified information is obviously not of primary
concern in this case. It’s funny how that sort of attitude toward classified
information has tended to come back to haunt politicians in recent years.
This tactic is nothing new among Washington elites. Trump
fans with short memories would probably prefer not to be reminded that it was a
minor variation on this debacle — the use of a private (and nonsecure) server
to conduct official business, thus preventing those records from being obtained
by investigators — that had fatally crippled Hillary Clinton’s
campaign in 2016. In that case, we found out that several foreign intelligence
services had likely infiltrated her server and email correspondence before she
wiped them.
In this case, the Trump administration . . . well, they
hacked themselves with near-lunatic incompetence. Set aside the
contemptible mistreatment of classified information on a questionably secure
channel. Set aside the fact that these people accidentally invited their own journalistic
enemy to this channel — and they got very lucky that it was Goldberg they
accidentally awarded TS/SCI clearances to; imagine these blunderers
accidentally inviting Glenn Greenwald to join them, for God’s sake. The real
gut punch is that the debacle reveals Trump’s people to be rank hypocrites on
the very issue they justifiably crucified Hillary Clinton over. It’s hard not
to conclude that it’s amoral hackery all the way down.
This scandal is not over, or at least it should not be.
How many other people in the government — every part of the government — carry
on similar “off-the-books” chats to keep critical information permanently
undiscoverable by the American people? How do we know this exact same mistake
hasn’t happened before? After all, these people sure seem to keep a lot of
journalists’ names in their online Rolodexes, regardless of their public
pretenses.
This scandal is not about policy. This is about
competence. This is about trust. Questions are now turning to whether
Waltz or Hegseth will face any consequences for this massive compromise of
national security information. I doubt it. (They’re still loyal to Trump, after
all — the highest and only commandment for continued service.) My prediction:
Nobody will be punished at all, save for temporary loss of face.
What did we learn? I guess we learned not
to do it again. But, in all honesty, I’m not sure that anyone involved in
this fiasco has learned even that.
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