To quote the great Vince Lomardi, "What in the hell is going on around here?"
A catastrophic security leak is triggering bipartisan outrage after the Atlantic revealed that senior Trump administration officials accidentally broadcast highly sensitive military plans through a Signal group chat with a journalist reading along.
On the Senate floor on Monday, the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called it “one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence I have read about in a very, very long time” and urged Republicans to seek a “full investigation into how this happened, the damage it created and how we can avoid it in the future”.
“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally,” the Delaware senator Chris Coons wrote on Twitter/X. “We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe.” (The Guardian)
Basically, the TL/DR for this is that around the time of the strikes earlier this month against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, there was a group chat on Signal between the principals involved here - SecDef Hegseth, NatSec Advisor Waltz, DNI Gabbard, VP Vance, SecState Rubio, WH advisor Miller (and a few others more than likely) - and apparently someone added to the chat the phone number of a senior journalist for the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who reported it earlier today to everyone's outrage.
Now, how he got it I suspect everyone would like to know but here's my first thought: why in the holy fuck did they do this over a publically available messaging system such as Signal (which is end-to-end encrypted, contrary to popular opinion) and not over the secure communications systems the United States is known for?
Secondly, who sent the group chat links to Goldberg, a well-known Trump critic? Third, and here's a political angle: this effectively nullifies conservative attacks against Democrats' who've in the past been loose and fast with cybersecurity and other security issues - Hillary Clinton and her emails, Eric Swalwell and his daillance w/a known communist Chinese spy - because now the argument can be made that if you're going to prosecute/attack them, then you need to go after whoever leaked these plans to the Atlantic. (Remember conservatives' criticisms of the well-known "two-tier system of justice"? Yeah, the argument can be made that if Trump wants to go after his political critics, then he also needs to have this investigated fully as well.
Suffice it to say, both sides of Congress - Democrats and Republicans - are horrified and outraged over it and I don't blame them...and it also throws out comments both Waltz and Hegseth have made towards Democrats' in past years.
Finally, there's another part of this angle that I suspect will come out in short order - by using Signal to communicate rather than through official comms, were they trying to escape scrutiny via. the Federal Records Act? Trust me when I say this, folks: you can escape a lot of things in government, but God help you if you misplace a piece of paper record somewhere.
