I can barely keep up with the daily news from the White House right now. This week’s story is pretty awful, though, and worthy of analysis not because it’s special but because it’s a loud, overbright version of everything else the administration is up to.
In short words: a bunch of senior officials built a text chain on Signal, a private app for text communication that’s forbidden on secure phones, probably so they could avoid records retention. The group included cabinet secretaries, the vice president, and other senior administration folks, but not the acting chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the President. They also accidentally invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic magazine. My operating theory is that they meant to invite Jonah Goldberg, but whoever they meant to get, they added a journalist, and the journalist recorded the chat as they used it to plan an upcoming military operation.
After the operation, which turns out to have been bombing a civilian apartment building to get a military target, the journalist ratted them out by saying he was in the chat. The Director of National Intelligence, who was in front of Congress, was questioned about the chat. She lied like a rug, figuring the journalist wouldn’t publish. The Atlantic called her bluff, and the chat is all over social media. We know the DNI committed perjury, lawsuits are flying, and a few people are even noticing this “military operation” is a war crime.
Actually calling people out over war crimes is further than most of our political class will go, as we know from the example of Henry Kissinger. But maybe the people involved in this story like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard should stay close to home for a while in case they have to go to the Hague, as defendants.
Last, but not least, on the subject of operational security, the National Security Adviser, who was in this illegally unsafe Signal chat, had his Venmo information open to the public until the press revealed that he’d done so today. Once the horses were out, though, he closed the barn door.
(I cannot take credit for the title pun; I prefer it to Signalgate.)
Sources:
- The Atlantic: Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal.
- Letters from An American: March 26, 2025. Heather Cox Richardson has an easy-to-follow version of the story up to the date of the article.
- NPR: ‘Heads are exploding’: How security experts see the Signal war-plan breach.
- Wired: Mike Waltz Left His Venmo Friends List Public.
- The American Prospect: Michael Waltz’s Venmo Is Public, and It’s Full of Journalists. One wonders why he’s paying journalists (or vice versa).
- NBC: Negligently disclosing national defense information is illegal — and it doesn’t have to be classified.