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      Trump has managed to spin Signalgate as a media lapse, not a major security breach | Andrew Roth

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      When it comes to Trump-era scandals, the shameless responses to “Signalgate”, in which top administration officials discussing details of an impending strike in Yemen in a group chat without noticing the presence of a prominent journalist, should set alarm bells ringing for its brazenness and incompetence.In a particularly jaw-dropping exchange, Tulsi Gabbard, the United States’ director of national intelligence, was forced to backtrack during a house hearing after she had said that there had been no specific information in the Signal chat about an impending military strike. Then, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published the chat in full, contradicting Gabbard’s remarks that no classified data or weapons systems had been mentioned in the chat.“My answer yesterday was based on my recollection, or the lack thereof, on the details that were posted there,” said Gabbard. “What was shared today reflects the fact that I was not directly involved with that part of the Signal chat.”Then there was the US secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth who – staring straight down the camera – baldly stated: “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.” The next day, Goldberg revealed that Hegseth himself had texted the precise timing of the attacks and the weapons systems to be used, specifically F-18 jets and MQ-9 drones.And Michael Waltz, the White House national security adviser, was left scrambling on live television as he was quizzed by a Fox News anchor on how Goldberg’s number had ended up on his phone. “You’ve never talked to him before so how is the number on your phone?” asked conservative television anchor Laura Ingraham. “It gets sucked in,” Waltz, a former congressman and army special forces soldier, replied – without explaining how a number can get “sucked in” to a phone.But despite all this, no one is really taking the prospects of an investigation seriously. At heart, this is about politics – and the fact is that Democrats simply don’t have the votes or the sway to deliver a body blow to the administration at this point.It’s unlikely that anyone will be punished. Donald Trump has told his aides that he doesn’t want to give the Atlantic a scalp, and vice-president JD Vance responded forcefully during a trip to Greenland on Friday: “If you think you’re going to force the president of the United States to fire anybody you’ve got another think coming … I’m the vice-president saying it here on Friday: we are standing behind our entire national security team.”For decades, national security was broadly seen as the last bastion of bipartisanship in Washington, an area where Democrats and Republicans put aside their differences for a general consensus on supporting the national interest. Members of Congress on the intelligence and foreign affairs committees often maintained cordial relationships. There was also an understanding that big scandals could jump the partisan line, and lead to serious repercussions even with tensions between the parties at their highest.Scooter Libby, once chief of staff to vice-president Dick Cheney, was sentenced to prison after an investigation into the leak of the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. The Department of Justice under Barack Obama launched more Espionage Act investigations for leaking sensitive information than all previous administrations combined.And the FBI, of course, launched a years-long investigation into Hillary Clinton for keeping emails on a home computer server that ultimately may have helped sway the elections. “It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity,” Clinton wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Friday. “We’re all shocked – shocked! – that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws … What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.”Observers have remarked that the scandal would have been far greater if it had taken place at a lower level in the intelligence community. Mid-level officers and defence officials would all face far harsher blowback if they were caught divulging the kind of information that Hegseth sent into the chat, including the specific timing of the strikes and the weapons systems to be used.But the Trump administration believes that it can simply divert and divide public attention until there is a new scandal. That may be a winning strategy. Trump is to introduce tariffs this week that will probably dominate the news agenda for weeks. And his deputies are out on cable news every day, pushing back at the media for covering the scandal and suggesting that Goldberg somehow sneaked his way into the chat rather than being added directly by Waltz, the national security adviser.“They have treated this as a media event to be spun rather than a grievous error to be rectified,” wrote Phil Klay, a military veteran and guest columnist for the New York Times. The early indications are that the Trump administration will skate through this scandal, crossing into new territory in Washington where even a major security leak can be repainted as the fault of the media for covering it. More

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      Protesters picket London Tesla showroom on global anti-Musk day

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      Blaring car horns on the three-lane A40 in west London are nothing new. However, on Saturday, they weren’t aimed at other drivers for a change; instead it was Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, who was the target of their anger as part of the “Takedown Tesla” movement, which has spread from the United States.“It’s too overwhelming to do nothing,” said Louise Cobbett-Witten, who has family in the US. “There is real solace in coming together like this, everyone has to do something. We haven’t got a big strategy besides just standing on the side of the street, holding signs and screaming.”The protest was part of a global day of protests planned under the umbrella of the Tesla Takedown movement. Organizers say the rallies will take place in front of more than 200 Tesla locations worldwide, including nearly 50 in California. Musk has not commented on the demonstrations.Cobbett-Witten has family in Washington DC, and is planning to move back to the US. The 39-year-old NHS worker, who lives in south London, said: “The checks and balances have just failed. As much as people are trying to not say these words, they are fascists, they are white supremacists, they’re xenophobes, they’re misogynists, and they’re coming for everyone. And what starts in America comes over here.”In the last fortnight, Tesla has responded to the protests outside its showroom and charging point in Park Royal by stationing a lone security guard at its gate, who said protesters had been friendly and peaceful. Dozens turned up on Saturday, their largest turnout since they began weeks ago.While Tesla sales have fallen in Europe, they rose in the UK by more than a fifth in February, according to new car registration figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.View image in fullscreenGay rights campaigner Nigel Warner MBE was attempting to hand out stickers to Tesla drivers entering or leaving the site in Park Royal. “This is the only thing you can do to make a difference,” the 77-year-old retired accountant from London said. “We are pretty helpless over here, the same as Europe, the only thing we can do is try to affect Tesla’s share prices and sales. It is something that has been done already with the Tesla sales dropping in many places. If he can’t sell his cars he is finished.”Documentary film-maker Jim Green, 56, who lived in New York and Los Angeles before moving back to the UK 18 months ago, had worked with Musk on a film a decade ago.Green said: “He was a different person, and he was very charismatic. He was talking when I was hanging out with him about the gigafactory where the batteries were being built, and he had a very compelling argument to make about the importance of batteries, an argument he made extraordinarily articulately. So I was very much leaning in to believing this guy wouldn’t turn into the fascist he has become.”He said Musk had attacked typical Tesla buyers, whom he described as wealthy liberals who care about the environment: “Musk has gone out of his way to insult that exact group of human beings. I lived in LA during the time when everyone who was wealthy and liberal traded their Toyota Prius in for their Tesla during 2014-2015.”Retiree Anne Kajava, 59, who is originally from Minnesota but lives in Cambridgeshire, said she was concerned about the United States’ change in policy on Europe and Ukraine.She said: “I am truly concerned about a world war three. I am concerned about a civil war within the United States. You could say those are extreme views but Trump is talking about war. You have JD Vance in Greenland; it’s not impossible.”Holding a banner attached to a Donald Trump toilet brush, she said: “I used to not hesitate to say I’m an American. Now actually I’m working with an acting coach, to fake a British accent so I can turn it on and off when I want to. I don’t want to be identified as American.” More

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      A tip for JD Vance: Greenland doesn’t care about your frail human ego | Sarah Ditum

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      In August 2018, I did something that JD Vance and his wife, Usha, can only dream of: I went to Greenland, and I didn’t cause a national outcry against my presence. The not-causing-a-national-outcry part of that was easy. All I had to do was show up and not be a thinly veiled agent of Trumpian expansionism while pretending to care about dog sled races.The other part – going to Greenland in the first place – is harder to explain. I’m not an explorer, a sailor or a climate scientist. I don’t belong to any of the vanishingly few occupations with legitimate reasons to visit the Arctic Circle. I was there, inexplicably, as a literary journalist.In 2014, a 24-year-old Greenlandic writer called Niviaq Korneliussen published her debut novel, written in Greenlandic rather than the dominant Danish language. (Greenland is self-governing on domestic policy, but has been a Danish territory since the 18th century.) Four years later, it had been translated into English with the title Crimson, and become a bestseller. I had been sent to profile this unlikely literary superstar.A few days after the editor first emailed me about the assignment, a car arrived in the middle of the night to take me to Heathrow. I was halfway there when I realised that my weatherproof coat was still hanging, supposedly unmissably, next to my front door. I landed in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, with nothing but a big cardigan to protect me from the elements.My preparation was lacking in other ways too. I’d made contact with Korneliussen before travelling, but intended to call to confirm arrangements when I arrived. Except Greenland isn’t covered by EU mobile roaming agreements, so my phone didn’t work. No matter: I could use the wifi at my hotel to email.But the hotel – actually a seamen’s hostel – hadn’t put a password on its network. When I arrived, a large cruise ship was sitting in the nearby harbour, soaking up all the bandwidth. As I stood at the front desk, almost in tears about this professional disaster, a sailor walked past and called out a cheerful greeting of “Hey, English!” I’ve never felt so foreign in my life.The amazing thing, really, is that I could make it to Greenland in such chaotic fashion and not die of exposure. For millennia, the ice-smothered island had been luring travellers on to its barely habitable fringes, and then repulsing them. The earliest known settlers were Norse – walrus hunters who traded the ivory with visiting ships, and scratched out a difficult living from Greenland’s small patch of farmable land.Sometime in the 15th century, the Norse Greenlanders vanished and nothing in the historical record can say whether it was famine, disease or the sheer chilly isolation that finished them off. Their disappearance, writes the journalist Jon Gertner in his excellent book The Ice at the End of the World, “remains one of European history’s supreme mysteries”.The Inuit ancestors of today’s majority Greenlanders only arrived about 800 years ago, and maintained a healthily suspicious attitude to their home. In their folk stories, the ice caps were a place of strange creatures and unknown horrors. The few Europeans who visited tended to agree. Hans Egede, an 18th-century Danish missionary, declared that the centre of Greenland could have “no use to mankind”.Some men, though, wanted to change that. In the late 19th century, two explorers staked their claim to the strange, hostile landscape. First the Dane Fridtjof Nansen crossed the island from west to east, surviving brutal temperatures and terrifying crevasses to make the 260-mile journey by foot and on ski. It took 11 weeks.That stung the American Robert Peary into competition. He undertook an even longer and more fearsome route, crossing the northern part of Greenland. It was physically punishing, but perhaps even more so mentally, surrounded by nothing but blaring whiteness in the endless sun of the Arctic summer. On the ice, wrote Peary, “the nightmare of emptiness possessed us”.It wasn’t clear at that point in history whether Greenland would end up being Danish or American, but the Danes staked their claim first, establishing trading posts in the early 20th century. Since then technology – and climate change – have made Greenland ever more accessible.You no longer have to make iceberg-dodging approaches to the coast by ship: you can get a plane. And when you get there and find yourself improperly attired, you don’t have to get native Greenlanders to make you clothing from reindeer hide that’s been arduously chewed until it’s soft enough to stitch (which is how Peary got himself fitted out).Instead, you go to Nuuk’s shopping centre to buy yourself a new jacket, which is what I did. It was gougingly expensive (island prices), but still better than the pitying look I got from Korneliussen when we eventually met and she saw I was dressed in knitwear. Still, I wasn’t in danger of hypothermia: the temperature while I was there was a blazingly summery 10C.You shouldn’t imagine that Greenland has become too tame, though. Nuuk is the size of a small market town, and wilderness presses in as soon as you reach its limits. Hard, black volcanic rocks rear up from the shallow turf. There are no roads connecting Greenland’s settlements: the terrain is too rugged.The weather turned the day I was going home. It was touch and go whether my connection to Iceland would be able to take off at all: I believe it was the last flight to leave Greenland for 48 hours. I sat in the airport, hugging myself in my new jacket, marvelling at how ill-equipped I was to survive in a place so implacably indifferent to my plans.The lesson the Vances should take from their ill-fated expedition is that Greenland doesn’t care about human ambition and desires. Donald Trump’s attempt to take possession of it is just another episode in its contested history. But, even today, you cannot simply stroll on to the island and take it. So far, the Greenlanders themselves have made it very clear that they won’t be welcoming this new generation of American adventurers. Sarah Ditum is a journalist and the author of the book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties. She lives in Bath.

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      RFK Jr says they are poisoning us, influencers call them unnatural – but what is the truth about seed oils?

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      It’s curious that something so bland could cause so much controversy. Most of us have a bottle of seed oil, normally called vegetable oil in the UK, in our kitchens – a nearly tasteless but very useful fat that has been a commonplace cooking ingredient for decades.And yet this previously unremarkable golden liquid has sparked online furore and vicious debate. Nutrition influencers on social media have described it as “toxic”, “inflammatory”, “unnatural” and the root cause of the obesity epidemic.The US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has caused controversy with his views on subjects from vaccines to fluoride in drinking water, has said the population is being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils and urged people to revert to “traditional” fats such as butter, lard and beef dripping for better health.Last month the Wall Street Journal reported that fast food chains were promoting their shift away from seed oils after Kennedy’s criticisms. He even made a televised visit to a branch of Steak ’n Shake to praise its decision to cook fries in beef tallow instead.So should we really be ditching our bottles of vegetable and sunflower oils and covering everything in lard?Seed oils have been in widespread use since about the 1950s and, as well as being used for home cooking, are also in many ultra-processed foods. They include rapeseed (known as canola in the US and generally labelled as vegetable oil in the UK), sunflower, soya bean, corn, grapeseed, rice bran, sesame and safflower. While you can buy cold-pressed seed oils, the most common production method involves using a solvent (normally hexane) to extract the oil from the plant. It is correct that hexane is a toxic substance, but it is almost entirely removed from the final product by the refining process – the EU allows a maximum residual limit of 1mg per kilo.The refining process includes bleaching and deodorising, both of which critics have jumped on to claim that seed oil is “unnatural” and therefore “bad”.Tom Sanders, emeritus professor of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London, who has spent his career researching dietary fat and health, explains: “The processing actually takes out potentially toxic material.”Sarah Berry, professor of nutritional sciences at King’s, agrees: “The end product, in my opinion, is very safe to eat.”The next allegation against seed oils is that they are “inflammatory”. This assumption is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the science, says Berry.View image in fullscreenSeed oil critics claim that the type of omega-6 fatty acid present in them (called linoleic acid) can be inflammatory, whereas omega-3 – the other essential polyunsaturated fatty acid, found in foodstuffs such as oily fish, flaxseed and chia seeds – can reduce inflammation.“Because the enzymes used to convert omega-3 into anti-inflammatory chemicals are the same ones used to convert omega- 6, their argument is that having too much seed oil will mean the enzymes are stolen away from the omega-3,” says Berry.“This isn’t true. It’s true from a theoretical biochemical pathway. It’s true in mice upon unrealistic stimuli. But it is absolutely not true in humans.” In fact, randomised, controlled trials show that linoleic acid has either a neutral or, in most studies, an anti-inflammatory effect in humans.“The idea that linoleic acid is some sort of toxic thing is absolute nonsense,” says Sanders. “It’s an essential nutrient. Of the essential fatty acids it’s the most important one. If you’re deficient, it impairs immune function and platelet function doesn’t work.”It also has a potent cholesterol-lowering effect, says Berry, who is chief scientist at nutrition company Zoe. “It has been shown to reduce blood cholesterol significantly. Because of this and based on the current evidence I would say that not only are seed oils not bad for us, they are a healthy part of our diet.”Sanders attributes much of the decline in cardiovascular disease we’ve seen in the past 50 years to our increased consumption of seed oils. A few weeks ago, a study that followed 200,000 adults over 33 years found that those who replaced a tablespoon of butter a day with the same amount of plant-based oil such as soya bean or rapeseed had a 17% reduction in risk of death from all causes. The study, which was published in JAMA Internal Medicine also found a 17% reduction in risk of death from cancer.“Our study found that higher butter intake was associated with increased deaths from all causes and cancer, while higher intake of plant-based oils was associated with lower deaths from all causes, cancer and cardiovascular disease,” said lead study author Yu Zhang, a graduate student at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.Priya Tew, from Dietitian UK, says some of the confusion might have come from a 1960s study: “It showed men with heart disease had a higher intake of seed oils. But this was through margarines that also contain trans fats, which we know increase the risk of heart disease.”A similar logic applies to the argument that, as our intake of seed oils has risen – which it has more than 200-fold over the past 50 to 70 years – so too have our rates of chronic disease.“Association does not mean causality,” says Berry. “Think what else has changed; our food landscape is almost unrecognisable compared with 70 years ago. It’s estimated 60% of the seed oils we consume come from ultra-processed food which has many other chemicals that are unhealthy for us and processes that affect the healthfulness of the food.”In other words, it’s not the seed oil that’s the problem.Berry’s recent statements about seed oils have landed her in hot water. After appearing on a podcast explaining that seed oils are healthy, she received relentless hate mail, including being told she’s “the most hated scientist in America”.“It nearly got to the point where I was going to stop speaking out on the topic so I didn’t have to be subjected to such horrible comments and meanness. But then I thought, that’s exactly what they want. They want to shut down the real evidence, so it just galvanised me to speak out about it even more.”As always, with nutrition, it’s better to consider overall diet than to hyper-fixate on one ingredient. But these kind of messages don’t tend to get as much traction. “Human nature is such that we are more susceptible to risk and scare headlines,” Berry says. “They’re going to get more clicks than a balanced, boring nutrition scientist like myself saying seed oils are fine as part of a balanced diet.”Sanders says you don’t have to ditch your seed oils and you shouldn’t swap them for butter or lard. “The seed oil scare is all just gossip. It’s not based on any good science at all.” More

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      When the physicists need burner phones, that’s when you know America’s changed | John Naughton

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      At international academic conferences recently, one sees an interesting trend. Some American participants are travelling with “burner” phones or have minimalist laptops running browsers and not much else. In other words, they are equipped with the same kind of kit that security-conscious people used to bring 15 years ago when travelling to China.So what’s up? Well, these academics have a finger on the pulse of Trump’s America, and are concerned about what might happen when they return home. They’ve read on Robert Reich’s Substack about the French scientist who was prevented from entering the country because US Border Patrol agents had found messages from him in which he had expressed his “personal opinion” to colleagues and friends about Trump’s science policies.Or they’ve heard about Dr Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University who was trying to return to the US after visiting relatives in Lebanon. She was deported, reports Reich, “despite having a valid visa and a court order” blocking her removal. “Federal authorities alleged that they found ‘sympathetic photos and videos of prominent Hezbollah figures’ in her phone and that she attended the funeral for the leader of Hezbollah in February.”And they also know about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, whom – though he is a legal permanent resident of the US and has not been charged with a crime – the government is trying to deport because he had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia.Those pro-Gaza demonstrations so irked the Trump regime that it demanded the return of $400m of federal research funding. When Columbia sought a meeting to discuss the matter, it received a letter setting out the conditions that it would have to accept before the government would deign to talk. These included a stipulation that Columbia must “begin the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years”.The bullying of Columbia is the canary in the coalmine which reveals the Trump-Musk junta has it in for American universities. There are two reasons for their hostility. The first is that, as elite institutions devoted to freedom of inquiry and the telling of uncomfortable truths, they are anathema to the new autocrats in Washington. The second is that some of them (the so-called Ivy League) are fabulously wealthy, being for the most part hedge funds with nice universities attached. And if there’s one thing that Donald Trump cannot abide, it is large pots of money that he and his ghastly tribe can smell but not touch. So if the aloof trustees of Harvard, Princeton, Yale et al think that their august institutions lie beyond his reach, perhaps they should understand that Trump looks on them much as Henry VIII looked on the rich monasteries of his heyday.Many teachers and researchers in US universities are now fearful of what lies ahead. No line of inquiry is safe from the raging firestorm of Maga intolerance. Many of the most vulnerable areas of inquiry lie in the health sector – LGBTQ+ medicine, epidemiology, infectious diseases, immunology, and so on. But there’s also endangered research on environmental issues and the climate crisis, socioeconomic inequality, plus the humanities, social science and astrophysics.The looming crisis in the US is beginning to remind people in Europe of the 1930s, when the UK and the US began to realise that Jewish scientists needed to be rescued from the Nazis. About 2,000 scientists and academics fled the fascist countries between 1933 and 1941, fearing for themselves or Jewish family members. Then, universities in the US and the UK made space for and welcomed a whole generation of geniuses – Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Max Born, Rudolf Peierls, Francis Simon, to name just a few. Likewise, members of the Frankfurt School were rescued and installed in New York, where they became mightily critical of American capitalism but at least lived to tell their particular tale. As did Thomas Mann.Now, in a different age, there are stirrings in Europe to provide safe places for American researchers. In France, Aix-Marseille University is welcoming American scientists whose work has become untenable after the Trump administration’s cuts in certain academic sectors. The Free University of Brussels (VUB) is opening 12 postdoctoral positions for international researchers, which are open to American researchers working in socially relevant fields. The fellowships come with substantial funding (€2.5m) as part of the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme. It’s also aiming to attract American professors looking to relocate. VUB, with its Francophone sister university ULB, is providing 18 apartments for international researchers seeking temporary residence at the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies.This is the beginning of something hopeful. But it also raises the question of what UK institutions are doing to meet the coming challenge. The answer, at the moment, seems to be nothing much. Perhaps that’s because most of British academia still can’t get its head around the idea that the US is now an enemy, not an ally, and that the “special relationship” is yesterday’s story.What I’ve been readingHow I accidentally got sent Trump’s Yemen textsJeffrey Goldberg’s astonishing story about the White House security leak in the Atlantic.Philosophy and fatherhoodA curious tendency among western philosophers explored in an intriguing post by Doug Muir.AI has learned to reason … … or has it? A lovely explainer by Melanie Mitchell.

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      How is classified information typically shared and can officials declassify secrets whenever they want? A national security expert explains

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      U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on March 27, 2025, ordered top Trump administration officials to preserve records of their messages sent on the messaging app Signal from March 11 to March 15 following a transparency watchdog group’s lawsuit alleging that the officials have violated the Federal Records Act.

      This marked the latest development since The Atlantic on March 24 published a Signal chat among Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other national security officials discussing specific plans to attack Houthi militants in Yemen. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief at The Atlantic, was mistakenly included in the chat and wrote about what he saw.

      Trump administration officials have shared contrasting accounts about whether they were discussing sensitive war information on Signal – but maintain that they did not share classified information.

      Senator Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the Senate Arms Services committee, and Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat chairing the committee, on March 27 requested an investigation into how the Trump officials used Signal to discuss military strikes.

      Amy Lieberman, a politics and society editor, spoke with national security scholar Dakota Rudesill to better understand what constitutes classified information and how the government typically handles its most closely kept secrets.

      Democratic representatives share text messages on March 26, 2025, sent by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to other top Trump administration officials.
      Kayla Bartowski/Getty Images

      How are government officials supposed to communicate about classified information?

      The first way someone with the proper clearance can communicate about classified information is in person. They can talk about secret things in what is called a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF. This means a secure place, often with a big, heavy door and a lock on it, where security officials have swept the area for bugs and no one can easily eavesdrop. People who are in SCIFs usually have to leave their cell phones outside of the room, and then they can talk freely about secret information. A SCIF can be a particular room, or a floor of a building, or even an entire building.

      Second, there is print communication: written documents with classification markings, which have to be handled in really particular ways, like in a safe location, and can be transported between SCIFs in secure containers.

      Third, intelligence agencies, the White House and the Department of Defense also all have secure electronic systems. These include visual teleconferences, which are similar to a Zoom call and are secure for discussing highly classified information, as well as secure email systems and secure phones.

      Many people with clearances have what is called “high side” email, which is shorthand lingo for classified email and messaging. Many people with security clearance would have two work hard drives and two computers. One of them is “low side,” where there is access to unclassified official email, documents and the internet.

      All of these methods of secure communication can be clunky and take more time than people in our smartphone age are used to. That is the cost of protecting the nation’s secrets. My sense is the Trump administration officials wanted to move fast and turned to Signal, a commercial app that promises encryption. Signal is generally considered secure but is not perfect. There is abundant public evidence that Signal is not totally secure and indeed has been penetrated by Russian intelligence.

      Can something be declassified after the information has been shared?

      Yes. The president can classify and declassify at will via oral or written instruction.

      The president’s constitutional powers include removing classification controls after information has been released or leaked. Trump could at any point declassify the information shared on Signal. Several of the Cabinet-level officials on that Signal chat also have expansive delegated powers over classification.

      Even so, Trump’s national security Cabinet would have presumably still violated the law. For example, by putting national defense information inappropriately on an insecure app and not checking to verify the clearances of everyone on the chat and thereby allowing a reporter to be present, one could reasonably conclude that the team was showing “gross negligence,” running afoul of the Espionage Act.

      The Espionage Act, enacted in 1917, criminalizes unauthorized retention and dissemination of sensitive information that could undermine the national security of the U.S. or help a foreign country.

      Was the information shared on Signal likely classified?

      Looking at the Signal message transcript that The Atlantic shared, it seems like at least four things were all but surely classified.

      The most obvious was the details that Secretary of Defense Hegseth provided on the strike plans. These include the precise times that planes were taking off, what kind and when the bombs would fall. Recent reports have quoted defense officials confirming that this information at the time was classified.

      Second, the chat revealed that the president gave a green light for secret strikes at a Situation Room meeting.

      Third, there is the mere fact of these top officials deciding whether and when to execute attacks authorized by the president.

      And fourth, according to media reports, the chat included the name of an intelligence officer whose position may have been secret.

      The Trump administration says that there was no classified information in the chat. But several analysts have noted that defies belief. The exception would be a prior decision to declassify, but we have no evidence of that.

      FBI Director Kash Patel, left, Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe testify during a House Select Intelligence Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on March 26, 2025.
      Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

      What other issues does this bring to mind?

      First, we don’t know whether the Trump officials carefully thought about it before they set up this chat on Signal, which the Pentagon has warned government officials against using because of hacking concerns.

      Second, even if the officials did make a focused decision to use Signal, what is the wisdom of that? I find it really, really hard to imagine that was a prudent decision when we think about how insecure this app is. There is also the fact that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to Ukraine and the Middle East, was party to the chat while he was in Russia. We do not know for sure if he had a device running Signal on him personally while he was in Russia, but in any event he would have been under intense Russian surveillance.

      A broader issue is how the Trump administration is enforcing the law is a giant question mark. Usually, the law both authorizes the U.S. government to do things, and also says it cannot do things. Law enables and limits everyone, including the president. However, Trump wrongly claims that he is the final authority on the law, and so far the Justice Department only seems to be enforcing the law against people outside of the administration.

      So does the law limit the Trump administration in any practical sense? Right now it is not clear – and there is abundant reason to be concerned about that from a rule of law standpoint. More

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      ‘Detention Alley’: inside the Ice centres in the US south where foreign students and undocumented migrants languish

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      Behind the reinforced doors of courtroom number two, at a remote detention centre in central Louisiana, Lu Xianying sat alone before an immigration judge unable to communicate.Dressed in a blue jumpsuit that drooped from his slight frame, he waited as court staff called three different translation services, unable to find an interpreter proficient in his native Gan Chinese.Like almost all of the 17 detainees appearing before Judge Kandra Robbins during removal proceedings on Tuesday morning, Lu had no attorney because there is no right to legal representation in US immigration proceedings. He sat silently, evidently confused. A substitute interpreter was eventually found, and began translating the judge’s questions into Mandarin.“I am afraid to return to China,” he told the court, as he described how he had already filed an asylum application after crossing the border into Texas in March 2024. Lu said he was worried a lawyer had stolen his money and not submitted his asylum claim. Lu, who had only recently been detained, struggled to understand, as the judge asked him to list his country of return should he be deported.“Right now my order is to be removed?” He asked. “Or should I go to court?”The judge explained that he was present in court, and provided him another asylum application form. His next hearing was scheduled for April.The LaSalle immigration court, inside a sprawling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centre in rural Jena, Louisiana, has been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks after the former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was transferred here earlier this month. His case has drawn international attention as the Trump administration attempts to deport the pro-Palestinian activist under rarely used executive provisions of US immigration law. The government is fighting vigorously to keep Khalil’s case in Louisiana and he is due to appear again at the LaSalle court for removal proceedings on 8 April.View image in fullscreenBut it has also renewed focus on the network of remote immigration detention centres that stretch between Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, known as “Detention Alley” – where 14 of the country’s 20 largest detention centres are clustered. And now where other students have since been sent after being arrested thousands of miles away.Badar Khan Suri, a research student at Georgetown University, was arrested in Virginia last week and sent to a detention centre in Alexandria, Louisiana, and then on to another site, Prairieland in eastern Texas. This week, Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested in Massachusetts and sent to the South Louisiana Ice processing centre in the swamplands of Evangeline parish.These distant detention facilities and court systems have long been associated with rights violations, poor medical treatment and due process concerns, which advocates argue are only likely to intensify during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and promise to carry out mass deportations that has already led to a surge in the detention population. But rarely do cases within these centres attract much public attention or individual scrutiny.“Most of the folks in detention in Louisiana aren’t the ones making the news,” said Andrew Perry, an immigrant rights attorney at the ACLU of Louisiana. “But they are experiencing similar, if not the same, treatment as those who are.”To observe a snapshot of the more than 1,100 other detainees confined at the facility also holding Khalil, the Guardian travelled to Jena and witnessed a full day inside the LaSalle court, which is rarely visited by journalists. Dozens lined up for their short appearances before a judge and were sworn in en masse. Some expressed severe health concerns, others frustration over a lack of legal representation. Many had been transferred to the centre from states hundreds of miles away.Earlier in the morning Wilfredo Espinoza, a migrant from Honduras, appeared before Judge Robbins for a procedural update on his asylum case that was due for a full hearing in May. Espinoza, who coughed throughout his appearance and had a small bandage on his face, had no lawyer and informed the court he wished to abandon his asylum application “because of my health”. The circumstances of his detention and timing and location of his arrest by Ice were not made clear in court.He suffered from hypertension and fatty liver disease, he said through a Spanish translator. “I’ve had three issues with my heart here,” he said. “I don’t want to be here any more. I can’t be locked up for this long. I want to leave.”The judge asked him repeatedly if he was entering his decision of his own free will. “Yes,” he said. “I just want to leave here as quickly as possible.”The judge ordered his removal from the US.Substantiated allegations of medical neglect have plagued the Jena facility for years. In 2018, the civil rights division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) examined the circumstances of four fatalities at the facility, which is operated by the Geo Group, a private corrections company. All four deaths occurred between January 2016 and March 2017 and the DHS identified a pattern of delay in medical care, citing “failure of nursing staff to report abnormal vital signs”.At the South Louisiana Ice processing centre, an all-female facility that is also operated by the Geo Group and where Ozturk is now being held, the ACLU of Louisiana recently filed a complaint to the DHS’s civil rights division alleging an array of rights violations. These included inadequate access to medical care, with the complaint stating: “Guards left detained people suffering from severe conditions like external bleeding, tremors, and sprained limbs unattended to, refusing them access to diagnostic care”.The complaint was filed in December 2024, before the Trump administration moved to gut the DHS’s civil rights division earlier this month.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA spokesperson for the Geo Group said the company “strongly disagrees with the allegations that have been made regarding services we provide at Geo-contracted Ice processing centres” including the facility in Jena.“In all instances, our contracted services are monitored by the federal government to ensure strict compliance with applicable federal standards,” the spokesperson said, pointing to Ice’s performance-based national detention standards that the company’s contracts are governed by.The spokesperson added: “These allegations are part of a longstanding, politically motivated, and radical campaign to abolish Ice and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government’s immigration facility contracts.”The DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Louisiana experienced a surge in immigration detention during the first Trump administration. At the end of 2016, the state had capacity for a little more than 2,000 immigrant detainees, which more than doubled within two years. A wave of new Ice detention centres opened in remote, rural locations often at facilities previously used as private prisons. The state now holds the second largest number of detained immigrants, behind only Texas. Almost 7,000 people were held as of February 2025 at nine facilities in Louisiana, all operated by private companies.“It is this warehousing of immigrants in rural, isolated, ‘out of sight, of mind’ locations,” said Homero López, the legal director of Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy in Louisiana and a former appellate immigration judge. “It’s difficult on attorneys, on family members, on community support systems to even get to folks. And therefore it’s a lot easier on government to present their case. They can just bulldoze people through the process.”At the LaSalle court this week, the Guardian observed detainees transferred from states as far away as Arizona, Florida and Tennessee. In an afternoon hearing, where 15 detainees made an application for bond, which would release them from custody and transfer their case to a court closer to home, only two were granted.Cases heard from detention are far less likely to result in relief. At LaSalle, 78.6% of asylum cases are rejected, compared with the national average of 57.7%, according to the Trac immigration data project. In Judge Robbins’s court, 52% of asylum applicants appear without an attorney.In the afternoon session, the court heard from Fernando Altamarino, a Mexican national, who was transferred to Jena from Panama City, Florida, more than 500 miles away. Altamarino had no criminal record, like almost 50% of immigrants currently detained by Ice. He had been arrested by agents about a month ago, after he received a traffic ticket following a minor car accident.He tried to resolve the matter at his local courthouse, and was instead detained by immigration authorities. Via his lawyer, the court heard his application for release. A letter from a leader in his local church described his role as a stalwart member of the congregation and “a man who truly embodies faith”.But a prosecutor for the DHS, who opposed all but one bond application that afternoon, argued that Altamarino, who had lived in the country for more than a decade, presented a flight risk due to his “very limited to non-existent family ties to the US”.The judge concurred, as Altamarino sat upright and listened through a translator. Despite acknowledging he was “not a danger to community”, she sided with the government and denied bond.Altamarino thanked the judge as he left the room, under watch of a guard. The heavy door closed behind him as he headed back into the void of America’s vast detention system. More

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      ‘It’s a scary time’: artists react to White House’s recent targeting of Smithsonian Institution

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      Artists, academics and politicians have shared their outrage in reaction to the Trump administration’s latest executive order targeting the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum network.Late on Thursday, Trump announced that his administration had ordered a large reshaping of the Smithsonian in an attempt to eliminate what he described as “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”.“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology,” read the order.Trump’s order specifically criticized the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Saam) exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture. The exhibit features 82 sculptures from more than 70 artists to “[examine] the role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States”, according to the museum’s website.The artist Roberto Lugo, who is featured in the Shape of Power exhibit, said it felt “scary” to watch the Trump administration attempt to censure his and others’ work.“The idea of something that I’ve made being in such an important exhibition, and being targeted by people who run the entire country,” Lugo said. “It’s a scary time because you just don’t know if your work is going to be used to help people understand one another or if it’s going to be used as a tool to further divide people,” he added.To create his featured sculpture, DNA Study Revisited, Lugo had to physically encase his entire body in plaster and rubber for hours at a time. It then took more than a month to create the finished piece.The creation of art, Lugo said, allows him to “process experiences”.“I have faced violence in my life because of racism,” Lugo, who is Afro-Latino, said. “As a child, I was assaulted with a baseball bat for trying to play in the wrong neighborhood.” He added: “This was a very therapeutic experience to feel like my DNA is represented in such an important exhibition.”Trump also condemned the widely lauded National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The museum, which formally opened in 2016 at a ceremony with then president Barack Obama, has been celebrated for its thorough curation process of Black American history.As a part of the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, Trump has ordered his vice-president, JD Vance, to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian’s museums, educational centers and more.Trump’s executive order has already sent shocks through the art and museum spaces, as officials weigh how to continue their work with an administration focused on limiting truth.Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett shared her frustration at Trump’s order and broader opposition to diversity and inclusion on social media.“First Trump removes any reference of diversity from the present – now he’s trying to remove it from our history. Let me be PERFECTLY clear – you cannot erase our past and you cannot stop us from fulfilling our future,” she said in a post on X.US representative Steven Horsford accused the Trump administration of “trying to erase Black history and silence conversations about systemic injustice” with this latest executive order. “By defunding institutions and banning critical conversations, they’re rewriting the narrative,” he said in a statement on X.The attorney and civil rights lawyer Ben Crump emphasized how Trump had specifically called out the NMAAHC, despite its historical archival work that benefits the national as a whole.“The National Museum of African American History and Culture reveals the truth about our nation’s past. Yet a new executive order calls for removing “divisive ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution and singled out the NMAAHC,” he said on X.Educators have also voiced their dismay at Trump’s attempts to attack the work of reporting on American history.Eddie S Glaude Jr, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, wrote on X, “And they said it was about eggs … ,” referring to Republicans’ purported focus on inflation and egg prices.In comments to the Washington Post, Chandra Manning, a professor of American history at Georgetown University, said: “It seems to suggest that if we allow anyone to hear the whole story of challenges that Americans have overcome, our nation will shatter. The American people are not so fragile as all that.”Of his Saam exhibit, Lugo said it is an opportunity for selected artists and the communities they represent to have a chance to share their own experiences.“The exhibition is really about telling people’s stories, just as human beings. For some of us, how we appear on the outside has driven people to act a certain way towards us and stereotype us,” said Lugo. He added: “My work is really about harmony and showing people how we’re alike and how we should celebrate each other’s histories. A blanket overall statement that anything regarding race is divisive is really misunderstanding the role of the artists and what it is that we’re trying to achieve with our work.”How and when Trump’s executive orders will take place remain unclear. The Smithsonian has not released a statement on the orders or how it plans to address ongoing attempts at the federal level to shape its content. More