I honestly don’t know how there isn’t a stack of accepted resignations of pretty much every Cabinet official whose remit is our national security apparatus sitting on the Resolute Desk right now awaiting transmittal to the National Archives to comply with the Presidential Records Act.
The military loves acronyms and there’s two that immediately come to mind that describe exactly what I was thinking when I heard the news that Cabinet-level department heads from Defence, State, Central Intelligence, and the National Security Advisor were discussing top-secret operational details concerning a military strike upon the Houthis in Yemen who have been menacing shipping and air traffic in the area…on a commercial group chat app called Signal, likely on their own personal devices which could be easily hacked and accessed by hostile actors!
Charlie-Foxtrot and FUBAR
The security breaches that implies is hideous enough on it’s own especially with a couple of participants being overseas and likely not using their portable secure compartmented information facility (SCIF) including one participant (Witkoff who is handling negotiations on selling out the Ukrainians to the master of his boss) who was in Moscow as this classified chat was in progress and almost certainly was being subjected to electronic surveillance by Russia’s Служба внешней разведки Российской Федерации (Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation).
Whatever they’re calling themselves this week, they’re still the same old Soviet KGB we all grew up to hate and fear during the Cold War.
The same one Vladimir Putin used to run, in fact.
These people are discussing the operational details of an attack…units involved, targets, and the sequencing…everything our enemies such as Russia and/or Iran who finance the Houthis as proxy mischief-makers would love to know ahead of time so they might warn the bad guys that the Americans are coming and perhaps turn the tables on the attack.
Information about an impending military operation doesn’t get any more secret than that which is why these sorts of discussions invariably happen in the White House Situation Room or a SCIF (whether it’s a portable one that travels with all Cabinet-level officials or a room in their house that’s been hardened against electronic intrusions and has secure communications equipment installed).
You really don’t want anyone “in the loop” that should not be there…and yet our National Security Advisor Mike Waltz somehow managed to add Jeffrey Goldberg (editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine) to this confidential conversation who almost certainly would not have had the security clearance needed to see any of the information being bandied about in the Signal app.
And it’s not like that can just happen by accident…Goldberg had to be in Waltz’s contact list in the first place to be added which begs the question…why? Especially given how much he slandered Goldberg’s reputation later in the day when he was being interrogated by the press over the scandal.
In fact, Goldberg showed far more restraint and care with the information he had inadvertently been made privy to prior to writing the article that brought the scandal to the attention of the American people.
But what’s far more concerning is just how little President Trump seems to give a rat’s rear end of just how colossally bad and dangerous for our national security this “mistake” that he thinks Waltz “will learn from” was.
Where do I start?
It didn’t help that President Trump started out with the Sgt Schultz defence when he was first asked about the scandal by reporters in his press conference…
Are you kidding me?
If we accept President Trump at face value that he truly knew nothing about what his underlings were up to when it came to planning a military operation he certainly would have had to have authorised prior to that level of planning and coordination amongst the affected departments, then that suggests that he’s at least as asleep at the wheel as he accused President Biden of being!
On the other hand, if he was aware and is trying to convince us he’s not…then he’s lying and that’s not a great look either.
He didn’t exactly help his operational security image when he complained of the secured communications facilities being harder to use than his personal phone. Here’s a hint: they’re supposed to be by design so that the President can be confident that the only people listening in on his conversation are the ones that should be!
“Not a great look” certainly isn’t confined to President Trump in this scandal as every one of those people in the Signal chat knew that they were using a potentially vulnerable means of communication for information that demanded the highest levels of operational security, especially Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Waltz!
Operational security for top-secret information is one of the most critical aspects of their job and for all of the jokes about Hegseth being a DUI hire and Gabbard being a Russian stooge, as a former soldiers they would have been well aware of the proper handling of top-secret intel and can’t be given a pass on this one.
When the journalist who shouldn’t have been there in the first place is the most responsible handler of the classified information in the chat by sitting on it until after the event had occurred and even then refusing to publish any of the classified details, that’s when you know you’ve really screwed up!
Using a SCIF and the Situation Room might well be inconvenient and the secure comms can be a pain in the butt to use but the alternative is that the bad guys get the info they need to kill our soldiers and sailors and inconvenience should never be used as a justification for being sloppy in handling secure information!
I can’t believe this is the first time they’ve used such a facility for these sorts of communications. This may well be the first time they’ve been caught by their own stupidity, I can buy *THAT*.
This is why these jobs need to be filled by serious professionals rather than TV pundits and political hacks who lack the proper experience and temperament to act as professional high-level officials entrusted with the care of our nation’s most precious secrets.
The details of the chat that have emerged including the use of emojis really do not shower the participants with credit for being serious stewards of national intelligence. Doing so on a commercial platform that almost certainly could be hacked by foreign adversaries for the sake of convenience is just begging to be asked for a letter of resignation to be accepted if there was any accountability still left in official Washington circles.
At the very least, perhaps this might encourage the Republicans in Congress to some actual oversight over the Executive Branch which has been desperately lacking since Trump returned to the White House and stocked his Cabinet with the current cast of characters that just beggars belief.
But the messaging from the GOP members was generally tepid and devoid of any desire to hold the participants accountable for their exceptionally poor decision-making in this incident.
Certainly Gabbard and Ratcliffe didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory when they were interrogated in the Senate and were more than happy to dump the responsibility for explaining this fiasco to Sec of Defence Hegseth who promptly went into “cover my ass by obfuscation” mode with unfounded and inaccurate slander against the Goldberg the journalist.
And that’s the part that really makes me angry at the rank hypocrisy on display.
If the corresponding Cabinet members of the Biden administration had been caught discussing top-secret war plans on an insecure application platform, you can bet that Jim Jordan would have commissioned hundreds of hearings and demanded to hang every one of them from the nearest yardarm for violations of the Espionage Act.
To say nothing of all of the fuss that was made over Hillary Clinton’s unauthorised EMAIL server in her home that was equally deplorable and a breathtakingly stupid decision on her part but didn’t contain anything that even approached the sensitivity of the information discussed on Signal and that server likely cost her election in 2016.
Let me be very clear about this: maintaining the secrecy of our nation’s sensitive information is *NOT* a partisan issue. It is something that people trusted with security clearances should do as a matter of course because keeping secrets secure saves precious lives of our military personnel and our intelligence assets throughout the world.
Loose lips really do sink ships!
If any one of these people had the merest iota of honour, they’d have offered their resignations to President Trump immediately and refused to take “no” for an answer.
You can draw your conclusions on their character as you wish. For me, they were unqualified choices at best when they were nominated and confirmed and I’ve seen nothing since that convinces me they will ever be competent members of our nation’s national security apparatus.
So without oversight from Congress and certainly no hope of seeing any of them in the prisoner’s dock answering to charges of espionage us mere mortals would have been subjected to in an instant, I can only hope that they will “learn from their mistake” as Trump somehow thinks Waltz will do and use only properly secured communications systems in the future when discussing classified information even though I’d rather they take Gunny’s advice to heart and act upon it at all times…
