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“Top Trump administration officials mistakenly disclosed war plans in a messaging group that included a journalist shortly before the U.S. attacked Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis, the White House said on Monday…
“The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg said in a report on Monday that he was unexpectedly invited on March 13 to an encrypted chat group on the Signal messaging app… Hours before [the] attacks started, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted operational details about the plan in the messaging group, ‘including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,’ Goldberg said…
“Accounts that appeared to represent Vice President JD Vance, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and senior National Security Council officials were assembled in the chat group, Goldberg wrote… National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes said the chat group appeared to be authentic.” Reuters
The left is critical of the use of Signal, and accuses prominent officials of hypocrisy.
“It is jaw-dropping that senior Trump administration figures would accidentally leak war plans to a journalist. But the fundamental issue is that 18 high-ranking individuals were happy discussing extremely sensitive material on a private messaging app, highlighting the administration’s extraordinary amateurishness, recklessness and unaccountability…
“These conversations would normally take place under conditions of high security. While Signal is encrypted, devices could be compromised. Foreign intelligence agencies will be delighted. Legal experts say using Signal may have breached the Espionage Act. The hypocrisy is glaring.”
Editorial Board, The Guardian
“‘Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing,’ [Waltz], who added Goldberg to the chat, wrote on X in 2023. In 2016, now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also apparently in the chat, complained that then-President Barack Obama was protecting ‘political cronies’ and demanded accountability for Cabinet members…
“Hegseth, who evidently sent the detailed plans to Goldberg on Signal, was particularly prolific in his past condemnations. He said on one Fox Business show in 2016 that Clinton should face criminal charges and accused her on another one of betraying her country by exposing ‘sources and methods’ to potential foreign surveillance…
“Perhaps these folks have a more, let’s say, nuanced view of the need for strict enforcement now that they are the ones involved. If so, then members of the administration who were not involved will have to guarantee accountability—perhaps the president, at whose pleasure all of these officials serve. Trump, however, today insisted that ‘Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.’ Oh well.”
David A. Graham, The Atlantic
“I’ve been in the rooms where these decisions are supposed to happen. Vaulted, windowless, stripped of distraction. Cellphones are left outside. Every chair is accounted for. Intelligence, legal, diplomatic, and military voices are all present. No one riffs. No one forgets who might be listening. The stakes—human lives—don’t allow for anything less. Not this time…
“When military deliberations read like a Twitter draft, when the secretary of Defense speaks in hashtags, and when strikes are green lit with emojis, the strategy is no longer strategic. It’s spectacle…
“This wasn’t about Signal, or apps, or emojis. It was about mindset. A mindset that replaces structure with performance and treats war as just another opportunity for content. The only question left—one Congress must ask and that the public deserves answered—is how many more decisions of this magnitude are being made just like this.”
Brian O’Neill, The Contrarian
The right is critical of Goldberg’s inclusion, and accuses critics of hypocrisy.
The right is critical of Goldberg’s inclusion, and accuses critics of hypocrisy.
“I like Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth. I want them to succeed. The country’s security depends upon their successful execution of their duties and good judgment. But these are lapses in decision-making that are inexcusable. Waltz must know that Signal isn’t a secure system for communication, and he’s got to know better than to just add any old ‘JG’ to the chat list without checking…
“Hegseth must know he can’t just discuss highly secret war plans on an insecure system. A lot of critics argued Hegseth was too young and inexperienced to run the Pentagon. Making a mistake like this makes his critics look prescient…
“Maybe we don’t need to get rid of Waltz or Hegseth. But it would have been nice if either man had notified the president immediately and taken responsibility for the screwup.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“If there is a positive takeaway for the administration, it’s that things could have gone much worse. Goldberg could have broken potentially useful information when it could have been taken up by America’s enemies; another devious actor could have lurked for longer in pursuit of more damaging information; and we could have gained insight from the threads showing a level of fractiousness or falsity on the administration’s team that has not yet been in evidence…
“Instead, what we see largely just reinforces what we already know about the ideological positioning of these figures – it turns out that, behind the scenes as they do in public, Vice President Vance is a Euroskeptic, Pete Hegseth is more hawkish in deploying deadly American power, and Stephen Miller is somewhere in between. But these are sentiments that, unsurprising as they are, shouldn’t be flying around on Signal.”
Ben Domenech, Spectator World
Regarding comparisons to Clinton’s email server, “First, we should recognize that what Hillary Clinton did and what happened here (inviting a journalist into a group chat) are both quite bad… With that said, the reason that everyone is so casual about the use of classified material these days is because of the original sin of James Comey not prosecuting Hillary Clinton over her emails…“That set up an entire permission structure for people to mishandle classified materials… When the Left says, ‘We’ve now heard the end about her emails,’ the reality is, ‘But her emails,’ was the inciting event for an entire string of mishandling of classified materials on both sides of the aisle.”
Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire
“The idea that this would have been a major scandal under Joe Biden is laughable. That's the kind of revisionist history that should be treated with scorn. Did any of the people [criticizing the Trump administration] call for a single resignation over 13 American service members being murdered due to rank incompetency within the Biden administration during the Afghanistan withdrawal? The answer is no, they didn't.”
Bonchie, RedState
A libertarian's take
“There's a much bigger scandal than Waltz's alleged carelessness, however. The U.S. has been involved in Yemen against the will of Congress for years, and President Donald Trump reopened a dormant war without any kind of public deliberation. The messages that Goldberg chose to publish reveal that the timing was driven by hawks' desire to sell the war—and go over Congress' head—rather than any urgent threat to American lives…
“In other words, the scandal of the group chat was not that too many people knew about the war plans before they were carried out. It was that not enough people knew, because the administration deliberately tried to prevent a public debate from breaking out, as other officials revealed when Vance called for one… War is the most serious decision a government can make. Citizens of a republic should not have to perform Kremlinology—or wait for an official to fat-finger his contact list—to figure out what their leaders are planning.”
Matthew Petti, Reason
