Pete Hegseth should no longer be Secretary of Defense. Mike Waltz should no longer be National Security Advisor. Tulsi Gabbard should no longer be Director of National Intelligence. John Ratcliffe should no longer be Director of Central Intelligence.
Why stop there? Marco Rubio should no longer be Secretary of State. Susie Wiles should no longer be White House Chief of Staff. Steve Witkoff should no longer be chief negotiator and director of Kremlin art appreciation.
And, of course, J.D. Vance should no longer be Vice President.
We knew this before. We knew that appointing incompetent people of questionable character with deep gaps in their professional experience could—would!—only lead to disaster.
Heck, we knew the guy picking them had a track of record of mishandling classified information and keeping it in the bathroom of his tacky Florida mansion, no less; one of the areas we were most likely to see screw-ups would involve dangerous leaks of super-sensitive material.
What we did not know was how quickly this would come to pass, or just how stupid a scandal it would prove to be.
But now we know. We first started to get wind when The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg published an article earlier this week detailing how he was seemingly inadvertently included in a Signal chat with President Trump’s top natsec figures, in which they discussed details of an attack on Houthi targets in Yemen. Goldberg’s article was already explosive on several levels, whether in its detailing the truly world-class dumb security shortfall that had him included on the chat to confirming the truly world-class dumb security shortfall that these top officials were using Signal for such a chat in the first place.
But, as is dependably the case when liars and nitwits are cornered, the Trump team took a bad situation and made it worse. In testimony before Congress, Gabbard and Ratcliffe openly lied about the nature of the information shared in the chat. During an off-the-rails TV hit, Waltz made a good start by accepting some responsibility for the issue, but then made matters worse by seeking to smear Goldberg and claiming the chat was not classified. (The White House also made this assertion.) Hegseth also viciously slimed Goldberg, blind to the irony of a former Fox News host suggesting he was in a position to make any judgments on journalistic ethics.
Not only were these displays ugly, the repeated assertions that Goldberg was lying and that the Signal thread did not contain any classified information created both an opening and a journalistic imperative for The Atlantic to publish further details it had originally held back. On Wednesday morning, the magazine did just that.
The details were damning, including that Hegseth enthusiastically fed into the chat operational details about the planned attack; information on timing, targets and the types of weapons involved, that had it leaked when shared, have put American pilots in danger. Hegseth also revealed information about the location of targeted individuals that had certainly came from top secret intelligence sources, and should have been protected for that reason alone.
As CNN’s Natasha Bertrand has reported, the operational security violations here are manifold and deeply shocking. “It’s safe to say that anybody in uniform would be court martialed for this. We don’t provide that level of information on unclassified systems, in order to protect the lives and safety of the servicemembers carrying out these strikes,” she quoted a U.S. defense official as saying. “If we did, it would be wholly irresponsible. My most junior analysts know not to do this.”
Speaking before Congress, Ratcliffe and Gabbard both asserted that the information was not classified—in this case, then, they should be fired for not having had the sense to classify it. And everyone else in the chat should have had the good sense to keep such military intelligence off of channels like Signal. (Waltz’s multitude of errors here include creating a group using a platform inappropriate for such communications, including Goldberg therein—and seeking to have the information disappear after a set period of time.)
Other misjudgments were also revealed. Vance went on the record saying he wanted to delay the strike to squeeze our European allies—a view cheered on by Hegseth, who stated he “loathed” what he characterized as European freeloading.
A number of the participants cheered, with crass emojis, news of the attack that almost certainly included civilian casualties. This brings us to another reason such exchanges are invariably classified—to avoid any damage to the U.S. their release would cause. It certainly does us no good for the world to know our top officials are so ignorant and cruel.
So, as I was saying, in any other administration, Waltz and Hegseth would be gone and the others probably should be gone. But that is unlikely to happen here. Ousting senior officials for mishandling classified information would probably be an uncomfortable precedent for the president himself to set—or live with. For all the justifiable anger this incident has produced, the consequences for those involved are likely to be lenient, and the administration will continue its focus on firing people of color, women and dedicated public servants from their jobs.
