What a week in Washington, D.C.
It began Monday, March 24, when Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, a magazine President Donald Trump has on his enemies list, revealed he was inadvertently invited to a high-level group chat with more than a dozen of the nation’s top national security officials. The group chat contained secret plans to unleash a punishing campaign of air and missile strikes against the Houthis in Yemen in an attempt to end their threat to international shipping once and for all.
By all accounts, the opening salvo of the military operation, which is still occurring, was a roaring success. But the fallout from the group chat was a disaster. It distracted from the mission, resulting in a vicious blame game and combative attempts to deny the obvious — that classified discussions and secret details were compromised because of sloppy adherence to standard security protocols.
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Several missteps cascaded to turn an embarrassing mistake into a full-fledged fiasco. It was red meat to congressional Democrats, who, for two days, raked National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe over the coals while they denied personally contributing anything classified to the group chat.
How many mistakes were made? Let’s count.
The first mistake, which was, in many ways, the worst one, was national security adviser Mike Waltz’s decision to organize a group chat of 18 senior officials on the commercial messaging app Signal. The app features end-to-end encryption but is vulnerable to hacking once the messages are received and stored.
For that reason, Signal is not authorized for confidential or classified discussions by U.S. government or military officials, as specified in an Oct. 6, 2023, directive to senior Pentagon leaders.
Ratcliffe, who repeatedly made the case in his Senate and House testimony that nothing he contributed to the group chat was classified, nevertheless conceded that Signal was not the proper forum for hashing out plans to attack another country.
“Predecisional strike deliberation should be conducted through classified channels,” Ratcliffe said.
Every principal on the group chat thread, which included the vice president, secretary of state, defense secretary, national security adviser, CIA and ODNI directors, and sundry other lower-level officials and aides, knew or should have known that their discussions were clearly breaking the rules. Yet, no one spoke up.
The flagrant flouting of operation security, or OPSEC in Pentagon parlance, was exacerbated and ultimately exposed only because of Waltz’s errant invitation to Goldberg, which the former Florida Republican congressman still can’t explain.
As anyone who uses Signal knows, to invite someone to a group chat, you have to either enter their phone number or select them from your contacts.
Trump, who hates Goldberg, would likely not be pleased if Waltz was Signal buddies with the Atlantic editor-in-chief. Waltz told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, “I don’t know this guy … I don’t text him. He wasn’t on my phone.”
“So, how’s the number on your phone?” Ingraham asked.
“Somehow, it gets sucked in,” Waltz said, indicating he thought the initials JG referred to someone else.
He said Elon Musk would help figure it out, skipping over the fact that the FBI generally does these kinds of forensic investigations. It’s sorta its specialty.
There are two primary reasons someone in the highest levels of national security might prefer Signal over secure government systems: convenience or obfuscation.
“Sometimes, you have to move very quickly, and there are other devices that are very good, but they are very, very cumbersome,” Trump said. “You’re not able to use them from a practical standpoint.”
The other advantage is that group chats disappear, and if no record is kept, there’s no evidence that they ever existed.
Goldberg said Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group chat to disappear after one week and some after four weeks.
It’s entirely possible that Goldberg has the only transcript of the texts and that, had he not joined the chat by accident, we would never know it took place.
Many government officials have had the unpleasant experience of being embarrassed by what they said in texts or emails, which, under federal law, must be preserved and are subject to public release under the Freedom of Information Act.
One example revealed by the Atlantic was Vice President JD Vance’s initial reluctance to move ahead with the attack in Yemen until more messaging was done. Or his trashing of America’s European allies as “freeloaders.”
Though not classified technically, those kinds of internal discussions are supposed to be confidential.
Lawmakers are asking if there are other instances in which Signal was used inappropriately, either for convenience or to avoid leaving any record behind.
By the end of the week, the leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee sent a bipartisan letter to the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, requesting an investigation into “the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.”
There were several people in the group chat, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff, whose need to know was questionable, while senior members of the military were notably absent from the prestrike deliberations.
While Trump fired the Joint Chiefs chairman, there was an acting chairman, Adm. Christopher Grady, who was apparently not considered important enough to be in the group chat.
Given the first day of the Houthi campaign went off without a hitch, Waltz’s errant invite gaffe might have been written off as a minor glitch. However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a combative response. He came out swinging, hurling epithets at the messenger and nitpicking a fine semantical point about whether he shared a classified “war plan” or an unclassified “attack plan” with the group chat.
“You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes,” Hegseth said when the story first broke. “This is the guy that peddles in garbage. Nobody was texting war plans.”
The Atlantic withheld parts of the group chat it judged, in the hands of an adversary, “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel,” including, Goldberg wrote, “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
Hegseth’s vehement denial dared Goldberg to release the full text of the group chat, which showed Hegseth posted information that would be considered classified before an attack. The information included the exact time F-18s would launch from the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, what time they would arrive over their targets in Yemen, and in one case, who they were after — a “Target Terrorist” who was expected to arrive “on time” at a “known location,” a dead giveaway the United States likely had a human source in Yemen.
“We see incredible specificity — military time, F-18s launching at this point, weather good, go MQ9 reapers,” Rep. Jim Himes (CT), a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CNN. “Now, that is a degree of specificity that could have gotten our sailors and airmen hurt.”
“There’s only one response to a mistake of this magnitude. You apologize, you own it, and you stop everything until you can figure out what went wrong and how it might not ever happen again,” Himes said. “But that’s not what happened.”
“I think it’s really important that we not get wrapped up in classification debates, which is an important part of this,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), a former Army Ranger, said after the hearing. “The real focus should be about the pervasive recklessness and carelessness and impunity of this administration, and the fact that they simply won’t accept responsibility for a major mistake that everybody knows is a major mistake that endangered our troops.”
In any other administration, Hegseth would be fighting to keep his job, but Trump values loyalty and encourages his Cabinet to fight like hell against any criticism.
Trump also doesn’t seem to be following the controversy very closely. He insisted on the day the story broke that he didn’t know anything about it and, by midweek, still seemed unaware of Hegseth’s role.
“How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it,” Trump said at the White House while admitting he had no idea if the detailed attack Hegseth discussed was classified or not.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure. You ought to ask the various people involved. I really don’t know,” Trump said.
Hegseth’s job seems safe for now.
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“I think it’s a witch hunt. I wasn’t involved with it … I wasn’t there,” Trump said. “There was no harm done because the attack was unbelievably successful that night.”