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      Trump downplays Signal blunder: ‘there was no classified information’ – live

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      President Donald Trump kept downplaying national security concerns on Tuesday after top White House officials added a journalist to a Signal chat discussing plans to conduct military strikes in Yemen.“There was no classified information, as I understand it,” Trump said in a meeting with US ambassadors. “I hear it’s used by a lot of groups. It’s used by the media a lot. It’s used by a lot of the military, and I think, successfully, but sometimes somebody can get on to those things. That’s one of the prices you pay when you’re not sitting in the Situation Room.”He later called the Atlantic, a magazine with over two million followers on X, “a failed magazine” and its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was added to the Signal chat, “a total sleazebag”.A federal judge in Manhattan issued a temporary restraining order on Tuesday barring immigration officials from detaining Yunseo Chung, a Columbia University student and legal permanent resident the Trump administration is trying to deport for taking part in Gaza solidarity protests.The 21-year-old green card holder, who moved to the United States as a child, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday, arguing the government is “attempting to use immigration enforcement as a bludgeon to suppress speech that they dislike”.The US district judge Naomi Reice Buchwald said in court that the government had not laid out enough facts about its claims against Chung. She then granted the restraining order Chung had requested, which also prohibits the government from moving her outside the jurisdiction of the southern district of New York.According to an account of the hearing from a reporter, Matthew Russell Lee, a federal prosecutor asked the judge why she had included a provision that Chung not be moved out of the jurisdiction if she is eventually detained. “No trips to Louisiana, as in that other case in this court,” Buchwald replied, in reference to the transfer of Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia student protester, and green card holder, the government is attempting to deport. In a statement on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security said she had “engaged in concerning conduct”, including being arrested at a protest.Chung’s suit said immigration officials moved to deport her after she was identified in news reports as one of several protesters arrested after a sit-in at a library on the nearby Barnard College campus this month.Days later, officials told her lawyer that her permanent resident status was being revoked. Agents came looking for her at her parents’ home and also executed a search warrant at her Columbia dormitory, according to the suit.Chung has lived in the US since emigrating from South Korea with her parents at the age seven, according to her lawsuit.The Columbia junior’s lawsuit cites the administration’s efforts to deport other students who participated in protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza. They include Khalil and Momodou Taal of Cornell University, who received a notice last week to surrender to immigration authorities after he sued on 15 March to pre-empt deportation efforts.Following widespread anger in Greenland over Usha Vance’s plan to attend a dogsled race on the island this week, without an invitation from the organizers, the White House just canceled that public appearance.Instead, she will now join her husband, JD Vance, on a visit to the US-controlled Pituffik space base in Greenland “to receive a briefing on Arctic security issues and meet with US servicemembers”.That visit, the White House told reporters, “will take place in lieu of the second lady’s previously announced visit to the Avannaata Qimussersu dogsled race in Sisimiut”.Ignoring the uproar in Greenland over the plan for his wife, Usha Vance, to visit the territory this week without an invitation, the US vice-president, JD Vance, just announced in a video message posted on X that he now plans to join her.“I decided that I didn’t want her to have all that fun by herself, so I’m going to join her,” Vance said. “I’m going to visit some of our guardians in the space force on the north-west coast of Greenland, and also just check out what’s going on with the security there of Greenland.”News of the vice-president’s arrival is unlikely to placate the concerns expressed this week by both Greenland’s current prime minister and his successor.“Denmark, which controls Greenland, its not doing its job and its not being a good ally. So you have to ask yourself:‘How are we going to solve that problem, solve our national security?’” Vance told Fox on Sunday.“If that means that we need to take more territorial interest in Greenland, that is what President Trump is going to do, because he doesn’t care about what the Europeans scream at us, he cares about putting the interests of America’s citizens first,” he said.Earlier on Tuesday, Rasmus Jarlov, a conservative member of the Danish parliament, reacted with fury to a claim from the senator Tommy Tuberville, also on Fox, that the people of Greenland are “all in” on joining the United States.“A recent very large poll showed that 85% are against leaving Denmark to become part of the USA. Only 6% supported it. It is almost unanimous. Never has a NO been clearer” Jarlov wrote. “Yet these f….. people just continue to lie and tell the American public that people in Greenland want to be part of the USA. And the American ‘journalists’ let them get away with it.”The Pentagon recently warned its employees against using Signal, the encrypted messaging app, due to a technical vulnerability, an NPR report reveals.The report comes one day after the Atlantic published a story detailing how top national security officials, including the US vice-president and US defense secretary, had accidentally added a journalist to a Signal group chat, which revealed plans for military strikes in Yemen.The Atlantic’s revelations sparked widespread outrage at the security lapse and sent ripples of shock at the breach through diplomatic circles across the world. However, Trump administration officials have tried to play down the sensitivity of the information exposed to the journalist.But according to a Pentagon “OPSEC special bulletin” seen by NPR reporters and sent on 18 March, Russian hacking groups may exploit the vulnerability in Signal to spy on encrypted organizations, potentially targeting “persons of interest”.Signal uses end-to-end encryption for its messaging and calls. It is also an “open source” application, meaning the app’s code is open to independent review for any vulnerabilities. The app is typically used as a secure method to communicate.The Pentagon-wide memo said “third party messaging apps” like Signal are permitted to be used to share unclassified information, but they are not allowed to be used to send “non-public” unclassified information.In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson for Signal said they were “not aware of any vulnerabilities or supposed ones that we haven’t addressed publicly”.Read the full story by José Olivares:US academic groups sue White House over planned deportations of pro-Gaza studentsUS academic groups have sued the Trump administration in an effort to block the deportation of foreign students and scholars who have been targeted for voicing pro-Palestinian views and criticism of Israel.The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (Mesa) filed a lawsuit at a US federal court in Boston on Tuesday accusing the administration of fomenting “a climate of repression” on campuses and stifling constitutionally guaranteed free speech rights.Lawyers acting for the groups warn that the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech is likely to herald a broad clampdown on dissenting views in higher education and elsewhere.The suit comes after the high-profile arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian former graduate student of Columbia University in New York, who holds a green card, and Badar Khan Suri, an Indian post-doctoral student at Georgetown University, both of whom are in detention amid government efforts to deport them. Both had been vocal in support of the Palestinians. Lawyers for both men are disputing the legality of the Trump administration’s efforts to deport them.Another student green card holder, Yunseo Chung, who had also attended protests at Columbia, sued the administration on Monday after immigration officials tried to arrest her. Ice officials told her lawyer that her green card had been revoked. Chung has been in the US since the age of seven.The academics’ lawsuit filed on Tuesday alleges that Donald Trump and other US officials are pursuing an “ideological-deportation policy” and accuses the administration of deliberately suppressing freedom of expression by construing opinions supporting Palestinians and criticising Israel’s military actions in Gaza as “pro-Hamas”.The Guardian’s Robert Tait gives us the full story:Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is calling for a “full investigation” in the Senate, challenging Republicans to join in probing how national security leaders came to discuss wartime plans on a secure messaging app chat that also included the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic.However, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters an investigation was “already happening”, with the Trump administration’s intelligence leaders facing tough questioning at a Senate intelligence committee hearing on Tuesday.Thune added that the Senate armed services committee “may want to have some folks testify and have some of those questions answered as well”.The top Republican and Democratic senators on the armed services committee have been discussing how to proceed with an investigation.President Donald Trump called the messaging app Signal “the best technology for the moment”.Trump said his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, should not apologize after the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly included in the Signal group chat.“I don’t think he should apologize,” Trump said on Tuesday. “I think he’s doing his best. It’s equipment and technology that’s not perfect, and probably he won’t be using it again.”President Donald Trump kept downplaying national security concerns on Tuesday after top White House officials added a journalist to a Signal chat discussing plans to conduct military strikes in Yemen.“There was no classified information, as I understand it,” Trump said in a meeting with US ambassadors. “I hear it’s used by a lot of groups. It’s used by the media a lot. It’s used by a lot of the military, and I think, successfully, but sometimes somebody can get on to those things. That’s one of the prices you pay when you’re not sitting in the Situation Room.”He later called the Atlantic, a magazine with over two million followers on X, “a failed magazine” and its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was added to the Signal chat, “a total sleazebag”.President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting law firm Jenner and Block for previously employing former Special Counsel Robert Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.“We’ve taken action against a number of law firms that have participated either in the weaponization of government, the weaponization of the legal system for political ends, or have otherwise engaged in illegal or inappropriate activities,” said White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf.“The law firm of Jenner & Block is one of these law firms,” Scharf said, as he handed the order to Trump in the Oval Office.Away from the Signal leak, Donald Trump was meeting with ambassadors when he interrupted the meeting to sign a flurry of executive orders.The first was a pardon for Devon Archer – a former business partner of Hunter Biden who was convicted for his role in defrauding the corporate arm of a Native American tribe.The supreme court refused to hear Archer’s appeal against his conviction in January 2024. On Tuesday, the president signed a pardon for Archer, saying: “I think he was treated very unfairly … He was a victim of a crime so we’re going to undo that.”The Republican Senate majority leader John Thune said on Tuesday he expected the Senate armed services committee would look into Trump administration officials’ use of Signal, after a journalist said he had been included in a secret group discussion of highly sensitive war plans on the messaging app.Republicans so far keep rallying around the group of senior Trump officials being criticized for discussing operational details for bombing Yemen in a group chat.Texas senator Ted Cruz told the BBC that Americans should feel “very encouraged” by the substance of the discussion in the Signal group.While admitting the security breach – where a journalist was inadvertently added to the group – was a mistake, Cruz told the BBC: “What the entire text thread is about is President Trump directed his national security team take out the terrorists and open up the shipping lanes. That’s terrific.”Cruz was echoing the official White House line of defense. A statement released on Tuesday afternoon said: “Democrats and their media allies have seemingly forgotten that President Donald J Trump and his national security team successfully killed terrorists who have targeted US troops and disrupted the most consequential shipping routes in the world.”Trump campaign chief sues Daily Beast over defamation claimsA top campaign manager for Donald Trump’s victorious 2024 presidential bid has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Daily Beast, alleging the news outlet fabricated claims about his campaign compensation and deliberately damaged his professional reputation.Chis LaCivita’s lawsuit, filed on Monday in the US district court for the eastern district of Virginia, centers on a series of articles published in October 2024 claiming that he received up to $22m from the campaign and associated political action committees.The case also forms part of a larger, dizzying pattern of legal confrontations between Trump as well as those in his orbit and media organizations, following similar high-profile defamation suits against major news networks. Over the years, Trump and his allies have increasingly used litigation as a tool to challenge journalistic reporting they view as hostile or inaccurate.According to the court filing, the Daily Beast published multiple articles in 2024 suggesting LaCivita had “raked in” huge payments, including a piece by the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff that was titled Trump In Cash Crisis – As Campaign Chief’s $22m Pay Revealed.LaCivita alleges the reporting created a “false impression that he was personally profiting excessively” and prioritizing personal gain over campaign success – which they argue has harmed his personal reputation. The lawsuit – which does not name Isikoff as a defendant – claims the multimillion-dollar figure represents gross campaign advertising expenditures, not personal income.After initial correction demands from LaCivita’s legal team, the Daily Beast modified its reporting, reducing the claimed compensation to $19.2m and clarifying that funds went to LaCivita’s consulting firm. However, the lawsuit argues these changes did not adequately address the fundamental misrepresentation.Read the full story by The Guardian’s Joseph Gedeon here:Earlier today, Democratic lawmaker Rashida Tlaib described Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University student who was detained by US immigration authorities earlier this month, as a “political prisoner”.Speaking alongside several other progressive Democrats, Tlaib said: “In the United States of America, no matter your immigration status, no matter who you are, you have constitutional rights in our country.”Tlaib said that Khalil’s detention was illegal and a “direct assault” on due process, freedom of speech, and the right to protest in the US, warning that the Trump administration could begin targeting his other opponents. “This is a moment that should alarm all of us. If we do not stand up for Mahmoud’s freedom today, the lawless Trump administration will come for us all.”The White House released a statement calling out Democrats and their “media allies” for allegedly forgetting the results of the attack on Yemen.“This is a coordinated effort to distract from the successful actions taken by President Trump and his administration to make America’s enemies pay and keep Americans safe”, reads the statement.President Donald Trump has nominated a Republican attorney who was once accused of mishandling taxpayer funds and has a history of launching investigations against abortion clinics to lead the Department of Health and Human Services’ office of inspector general, the Associated Press reports.If confirmed by the Senate, Thomas March Bell will oversee fraud, waste and abuse audits of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which spend more than $1tn annually.Bell currently serves as general counsel for House Republicans and has worked for GOP politicians and congressional offices for decades.The president’s nomination is a brazenly political one for a job that has long been viewed as non-partisan and focuses largely on accounting for and ferreting out fraud in some of the nation’s biggest spending programs.President Trump’s Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow when he was included in a group chat with more than a dozen other top administration officials on the messaging app Signal, including a journalist who leaked the conversation.Witkoff was in Moscow meeting Russian president Vladimir Putin, but it was not clear if he had his phone with him. Witkoff flew out of Moscow on 14 March, according to Russian media.Bart Groothuis, a former head of Dutch cyber security, said western government officials would not take mobile phones with them to Moscow or Beijing, but use “burner phones” or secure means of communication to make calls.“Taking your own phone means giving them a free lunch when it comes to intelligence collection from the Russian side,” he said.Trump administration claims details of mass deportations are state secretsThe Trump administration invoked the “state secrets” privilege to avoid providing more information to a federal judge regarding this month’s highly contentious immigrant expulsions to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.The administration’s invocation of the privilege is a further escalation in Donald Trump’s immigration-related battle against the federal judiciary.According to a court filing submitted by justice department officials on Monday evening, “no further information will be provided” to the federal court in Washington DC based on the state secrets privilege. The filing said the case deals with Trump’s complete and absolute authority to remove “designated terrorists participating in a state-sponsored invasion of, and predatory incursion into, the United States”.In response to the Trump administration’s invocation, the federal judge in the case said that if the administration would like to provide more information about the Alien Enemies Act operation, they should do so by 31 March.Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act on 15 March to expel Venezuelan immigrants in the US. That day, 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadoran men were placed on planes and sent to El Salvador, where they were then quickly detained in a massive “terrorism” prison run by the Salvadorian government. For over a week, a federal judge has attempted to compel the Trump administration to release information about the operation.The Trump administration has said all of the Venezuelans expelled are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, and has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the gang “infiltrated” the US at the direction of the Venezuelan government. An intelligence document contradicts the Trump administration’s allegations. News reports, identifying some of the Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador, have published evidence and claims from family members that they are innocent and not members of the gang.After the expulsion of the immigrants, federal judge James E Boasberg temporarily blocked the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act for further renditions. In a later court order, Boasberg doubled down on the block, instructing the federal government to conduct individualized hearings for immigrants set to be expelled via the act, to see if it even applies to them at all.Read the full story by the Guardian’s José Olivares here:During an interview with the Bulwark, the Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg weighed in on whether he’ll release more Signal texts after he was included in a group chat with the US vice president and other White House officials discussing upcoming military strikes in Yemen.“My colleagues and I and the people who are giving us advice on this have some interesting conversations to have about this”, Goldberg said. “But just because they’re irresponsible with material, doesn’t mean that I’m going to be irresponsible with this material”. More

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      US war plans leak shows Five Eyes allies must ‘look out for ourselves’, says Mark Carney

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      Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has said the inadvertent leak of classified military plans by senior US officials means that allied nations must increasingly “look out for ourselves” as trust frays with a once-close ally.Speaking a day after it was revealed that a journalist was accidentally included in a group chat discussing airstrikes against Yemeni rebels, Carney said the intelligence blunder was a “serious, serious issue and all lessons must be taken”. He said it would be critical to see “how people react to those mistakes and how they tighten them up”.Canada is one of the members of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, alongside Australia, New Zealand and the UK and the leak of classified information is likely to put further strain on the group as it weighs how seriously the current American administration takes the handling of top secret information.The revelations came as Canada grapples with a rapidly deteriorating relationship with the United States, its largest trading partner and closest military ally.“My responsibility is to plan for the worst, is to think about the most difficult evolution of the new threat environment, what it means for Canada and how do we best protect Canada,” Carney said during a campaign stop on Tuesday. The prime minister called a snap election on Sunday.“Part of that response is to be more and more Canadian in our defence capabilities, more and more Canadian in our decisions … We have to look out for ourselves.”Asked about the incident on Tuesday, the UK’s armed forces minister, Luke Pollard, told the Commons Defence Committee that no British service personnel had been put at risk as a result.He added: “All UK service personnel are covered by our normal approach to operational security, and the committee will understand that I won’t go into the details of how we keep our involvement in any support for military operations in the Red Sea or anywhere else [secure].“But we’ve got high confidence that the measures that we have got with our allies, including the United States, remain intact.”A spokesperson for Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke at length at a briefing about the contribution the UK makes to joint military operations with the Americans. However, the spokesperson refused to directly criticise the two figures who were most critical of Europe’s record on defence, JD Vance, the vice-president, and Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary. The spokesperson also insisted that the UK remains happy to share intelligence with the US despite the leak.The government of New Zealand declined to comment on the matter. When asked by the Guardian if the security breach had raised concerns about the sharing of sensitive intel with Trump’s administration, the offices for New Zealand’s prime minister, Christopher Luxon, and the minister for defence, Judith Collins, said the situation was “a matter for the US administration”.Behind closed doors, senior government officials would likely be discussing the risks of sharing intelligence with the US, amid what could be viewed as a lowering of protocol standards, but the breach would not be a dealbreaker, said Andrew Little, whose ministerial roles covered security, intelligence and defence under New Zealand’s last Labour government.“Our relationship transcends individual administrations and individual political leaders. There will be things that – like everybody – members of this government, will be looking askance at. But I think it’s about managing the relationship in the long run,” Little said.So far, New Zealand has been managing its US relationship responsibly, Little said, but it was now “a relationship that requires constant vigilance”.Robert Patman, a professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin who specialises in international relations, called the security breach “extraordinary” and “cavalier”. “It does confirm what many of us felt, that Mr Trump has picked people according to loyalty, rather than competence, and this was almost a perfect storm waiting to happen,” Patman said.But the wider issue for New Zealand and other Five Eyes countries was knowing how to respond to the Trump administration’s “radical departure” from the rules-based order, which included making territorial claims against liberal democracies and siding with Russian president Vladimir Putin over negotiations in Ukraine.“We should be friendly towards the Trump administration where our interests converge, but this administration is doing things which are fundamentally a challenge to [New Zealand’s] national interests.”In Australia, the department of foreign affairs and trade said: “This incident is a matter for the United States. Australia and the United States engage regularly on implementation of mutually recognised standards for the protection of classified material.”Ben Doherty contributed additional reporting More

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      The Guardian view on the Signal war plans leak: a US security breach speaks volumes | Editorial

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      It is jaw-dropping that senior Trump administration figures would accidentally leak war plans to a journalist. But the fundamental issue is that 18 high-ranking individuals were happy discussing extremely sensitive material on a private messaging app, highlighting the administration’s extraordinary amateurishness, recklessness and unaccountability.The visceral hostility to Europe spelt out again by the vice-president, JD Vance, was glaring. So was the indifference to the potential civilian cost of the strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, designed to curb attacks on Red Sea shipping. The Houthi-run health ministry said that 53 people including five children and two women were killed. The response by the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, to the attacks was to post emojis: a fist, an American flag and fire. The lack of contrition for this security breach is also telling. Individually and together, these are far more than a “glitch”, in Donald Trump’s words. They are features of his administration.Mr Waltz appears to have organised the Signal chat and inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic. The magazine says that the secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, posted details of the timing and sequencing of attacks, specific targets and weapons systems used, though the administration denies that classified information was shared. Other members included Mr Vance; the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; the CIA director, John Ratcliffe; Steve Witkoff, special envoy to the Middle East; and “MAR”, the initials of the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.These conversations would normally take place under conditions of high security. While Signal is encrypted, devices could be compromised. Foreign intelligence agencies will be delighted. Legal experts say using Signal may have breached the Espionage Act.The hypocrisy is glaring. Mr Trump’s first presidential campaign – and several members of this Signal group – lambasted Hillary Clinton for using a private email server to receive official messages that included some classified information of a far less sensitive nature, and for the autodeletion of messages. These Signal messages too were set to disappear, though federal records laws mandate the preservation of such data.In many regards, this leak hammers home what US allies already knew, including this administration’s contempt for Europe, which the chat suggests will be expected to pay for the US attacks. The vice-president characterised an operation carried out to safeguard maritime trade and contain Iran as “bailing Europe out again”. Mr Hegseth responded that he “fully share[d] your loathing of European free-loading”. Concerns about information security are familiar territory too. In his first term, the president reportedly shared highly classified information from an ally with Russia’s foreign minister, and after leaving office he faced dozens of charges over the alleged mishandling of classified material, before a judge he had appointed threw out the case against him.The UK and others cannot simply walk away when they are so heavily dependent on and intermeshed with US intelligence capabilities. Their task now is to manage risk and prepare for worse to come. It may be that this breach is not chiefly distinguished by its severity, but by the fact that we have learned about it.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      It’s war and peace with Donald and Pete – and the worst group chat the world has ever seen | Marina Hyde

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      Once again, we find ourselves having an anguished debate about mobile phones and online safety, in this case asking: should we ban the devices for US national security advisers under the age of 60? Do you know what your national security adviser is doing on his device? Is he using it to stay in touch with other guys in the big-man-osphere to talk about bombing Hooters? Or did he maybe add the editor-in-chief of a leading general interest magazine to a Signal group in the crucial period running up to a highly sensitive US military operation in Yemen, seemingly committing so many alleged crimes that he should have a full-body orange jumpsuit tattooed on him for ever?By now, you will have caught up with the tale of one of the most idiotic breaches of security imaginable – seemingly executed, regrettably, by the actual US national security adviser. Mike Waltz seems to have been aided and abetted in his full-spectrum fatuity by other ultra-senior figures, including the vice-president, JD Vance, and the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who shared detailed operational and strategic information in a chat to which Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally invited. Is Hegseth OK? Has he returned to being – how to put this delicately? – someone you probably don’t want to give important tasks to “after lunch”?On another tangent, meanwhile, was there some extremely senior military or government official with either the first name Jeffrey, or the second name Goldberg, whom Waltz actually meant to add? And did that intended Jeffrey or Goldberg wake up the next day, see the Yemen news, and feel a deeply wounded sense of Fomo? “Wait, you guys bombed Yemen without me? I hate you ALL. I demand you put me in the group chat NOW, just so I can immediately flounce off and leave the group chat.”The breach exposes so many things that it is difficult to know where to start. It certainly highlights the almost immeasurably rich lexicon of emojis. You realise that a certain type of guy deploys the same three emojis for taking out a Houthi target as they would if Bryson DeChambeau nailed a slightly tricky putt on the 14th at the West Palm Beach Pro-Am. Punching fist, USA flag, flames emoji. Let’s GO, Bryson!That said, the emojis are obviously the best of it. Less easy to scroll past is the bit where Vance, or his proxy, says: “I just hate bailing out Europe again.” Then Hegseth replies: “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.” Mm. Three weeks ago, we had Vance offering a blanket disparagement of European forces as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. Now we have this Signal chat – yet another sweet memorial to all the European service personnel who gave their lives in the US Republican party’s endlessly stupid 9/11 wars. We never asked to be reimbursed for that military assistance – very BAD! very Wrong! – and are now repeatedly hearing that it meant nothing to Marine-adjacent shutterbug Vance, who remains the most unbearably loud and rude American at the luxury hotel breakfast. They really should make a darkly satirical TV show about these absurd, degenerate, unpleasant people. Call it The White Potus.Needless to say, the first instinct of the Trump administration has been to insult the journalist, when in less responsible hands than Goldberg’s this could have been catastrophically endangering information for involved US service personnel and intelligence operatives. At time of writing, Hegseth’s sole comment on the bed he and the guys just shat was to attack the man to whom they personally served this scoop, calling Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist”. Is he though? Come on, Pete! Given the same information in real time, your boy Joe Rogan would have livestreamed it and you know it. At least Donald Trump would have been up to speed with it that way. “I don’t know anything about it,” was the president’s sleepy verdict yesterday, a day he spent wetting his pants about some oil painting of him hanging somewhere in the Colorado state legislature.As for consequences, do please remember that we are dealing with the biggest hypocrites on the planet. Consider their own thunderous statements on infosec. Here is the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, just last week: “If you have a private that loses a sensitive item, that loses night vision goggles, that loses a weapon, you can bet that that private is going to be held accountable. The same and equal standards must apply to senior military leaders.” Also last week, here is Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard: “Any unauthorised release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.” Was Tulsi on the Signal chat? Course she was! If you still want more, here’s Hegseth mining the seemingly endless potential of Hillary Clinton’s careless use of a private server for classified information back when he was a Fox News host: “If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now.” “When I’m president of the United States, neither she nor any of these other people are going to be above the law,” was the previous verdict of one Marco Rubio, last seen on the Houthi chat appearing in the role of secretary of state of the United States.We’ll have to wait and see if these clowns will hold themselves to their own very high standards. In the meantime, please enjoy European diplomats declaring that as far as the relationship between the continent and the US goes, this is “the writing on the wall”. If only it HAD been written on a wall – that would actually have been more secure and secretive. Come to that, it would genuinely have been more secure and secretive to hire a skywriting plane. Great job, guys! Punching fist, USA flag, flames emoji, etc.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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      Stunning Signal leak reveals depths of Trump administration’s loathing of Europe

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      If Europe wasn’t already on notice, the extraordinary leak of deliberations by JD Vance and other top-level Trump administration officials over a strike against the Houthis in Yemen was another sign that it has a target on its back.The administration officials gave Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic a front-row seat to the planning for the strike against the Houthis – a stunning intelligence leak that has caused anger against Republicans who called for criminal investigations against Hillary Clinton and others for playing fast and loose with sensitive information.On the face of it, the strike against the Houthis had far more to do with the administration’s policies on protecting maritime trade and containing Iran than its concerns about Europe freeloading on US defense spending and military prowess.But Vance appears determined to push that angle as a reason to postpone the strike.“I think we are making a mistake,” wrote Vance, adding that while only 3% of US trade goes through the Suez canal, 40% of European trade does. “There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary,” he added. “The strongest reason to do this is, as [Trump] said, to send a message.”Vance was contending that once again the United States is doing what Europe should be. It is consistent with his past arguments that the US is overpaying for European security and the derision he displayed toward European allies (almost certainly the UK and France) when he described them as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. (Both fought in Afghanistan and the UK fought alongside the US in Iraq).It was during this policy discussion, Goldberg wrote, that he was convinced that he was reading remarks by the real Vance, as well as defense secretary Pete Hegseth, national security advisor Michael Waltz, and senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller.Then Vance went a step further. He tacitly admitted a difference between his foreign policy and Trump’s saying that the strike would undermine the president’s Europe policy – one that has been led by Vance in his divisive speech at the Munich Security Conference where he accused European leaders of running from their own electorates and of his Eurosceptic comments on Fox News.“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” Vance wrote. “There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”Those designated on the call also reflect the vice-president’s growing clout in foreign policymaking circles. Vance named Andy Baker, his national security advisor who helped lead the transition team at the Pentagon, as his representative. Hegseth named Dan Caldwell, a leading proponent of “restraint” in the exercise of US foreign power abroad to protect Europe and counter rivals like Russia, indicating the Vance team’s presence at high levels of the Pentagon as well.At heart, the disagreement indicated that Vance’s views of foreign policy are not quite aligned with Trump. Trump broadly sees the world as transactional and optimists in Europe have claimed he could force a positive outcome by forcing those nations to spend more on defense budgets. But Vance appears far more confrontational and principled in his antipathy toward the transatlantic alliance, and has attacked European leaders for backing values that he says are not aligned with the US.That makes Vance even more of a concern for Europe. Kaja Kallas, the European foreign policy chief, accused Vance of “trying to pick a fight” with European allies. Another European diplomat said: “He is very dangerous for Europe … maybe the most [dangerous] in the administration.” Another said he was “obsessed” with driving a wedge between Europe and the US.Back on the chat some sought – carefully – to talk Vance down. Hegseth said the strike would promote “core” American values including freedom of navigation and pre-establish deterrence. But he said the strikes could wait, if desired. Waltz, a foreign policy traditionalist, said: “It will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes.” But he agreed that the administration sought to “compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans”.“If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vance replied. Hegseth agreed that “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” But, he added, “we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this.”Miller, the Trump confidant, effectively ended the conversation by saying that the president had been clear. “Green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return.”Broadly, the administration’s policies on Europe are coming into focus. And there are few stepping up to voice backing for Nato or for Europe writ large. On a podcast interview this weekend, the senior Trump envoy Steve Witkoff mused about the potential for the Gulf economies to replace those of Europe. “It could be much bigger than Europe. Europe is dysfunctional today,” he said.Tucker Carlson, the host and another Trump confidant, agreed. “It would be good for the world because Europe is dying,” he said. More

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      Donald Trump is seeking to erase the United States as we know it | Laurence H Tribe

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      Less than seven weeks into Donald Trump’s second term as president, his administration has set off a new wave of handwringing over what has by now become a familiar question: has the US entered a constitutional crisis?Triggering the latest iteration of that worry, the government hastily deported more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, without hearings or evidence and thus without anything even resembling due process of law, pursuant to the US president’s proclamation “signed in the dark on Friday evening” that they constituted an invasion by a foreign state.Trump invoked a 1798 statute last used to intern Japanese Americans during the second world war, buttressed by powers he claimed were inherent in the presidency. Chief judge James E Boasberg of the US district court for the District of Columbia rushed to convene a hearing on the legality of the challenged action as two deportation flights departed from Texas, followed quickly by a third. Moments after the judge ordered them to return so he could rule on a motion barring the deportation, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, tweeted: “Oopsie … Too late”, with a laughing emoji, even as the court considered whether its order had been defied.The branch of government best able to uncover and safeguard both our noblest traditions and the simple truth in moments such as these – the judiciary – has been hobbled and vilified by Trump and his allies, making wildly irresponsible calls for impeachment that put dangerous targets on the backs of judges who rule in ways they dislike. Even mild-mannered chief justice John Roberts had to cry “foul”. The administration’s cavalier attitude toward courts that fail to do its bidding, exemplified by calls for Boasberg’s removal, seemed to confirm concerns about a looming crisis.But searching for evidence of a “constitutional crisis” in the rapidly escalating clashes of the executive branch with the judicial branch misses the larger cataclysm taking place across the US. This president, abetted by the supine acquiescence of the Republican Congress and licensed by a US supreme court partly of his own making, is not just temporarily deconstructing the institutions that comprise our democracy. He and his circle are making a bid to reshape the US altogether by systematically erasing and distorting the historical underpinnings of our 235-year-old experiment in self-government under law.What we are currently living through is nothing less than a reorganized forgetting of the building blocks of our republic and the history of our struggles, distorting what it means to be American. The body politic is being hollowed out by a rapidly metastasizing virus attacking the underpinnings of our entire constitutional system. Make no mistake. This is how dictatorship grows.Symptomatic of that reshaping is the peculiar emergence, in a duet staged by the president together with the world’s richest man and Trump’s main benefactor, of a co-presidency without precedent in our republic and without even a hint of the irony in such shared power being propagated by ideologues whose mantra has long been the need for a “unitary presidency”.As staffers of the newly minted so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) raided congressionally created independent federal agencies and foundations without warning and slashed entire programs without thought, the Trump administration stuttered when asked by the courts to explain who was in charge of the “department” that no Congress had created – and how the leader of that enterprise had somehow acquired the power of the purse that the constitution clearly delegated only to Congress.More than just stonewalling courts and refusing to provide basic information on government activities, the Trump administration has waged war on history itself. Having first debilitated our capacity to act, it is now coming after our capacity to think. The same day Boasberg directed the administration to explain why it had seemingly failed to comply with his order, Doge staffers marched into the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency responsible for funding many needy public museums, libraries and historic repositories across the country.Like Julius Caesar besieging and burning the Library of Alexandria, the Doge officials descended upon the IMLS to begin the process of gutting the public institutions dedicated to preserving and making widely available the shared memory of our past. It was none other than Benjamin Franklin whose conception of public libraries democratized knowledge and made it accessible to ordinary people. What used to be the private province of the few became the public province of the many.The attack on the IMLS is only the latest episode of the Trump presidency’s attempt to privatize information while replacing authentic history with a version more to its liking. As internet archivists race to back up the nation’s files and records, Trump administration officials have been systematically purging government websites in real time of the tools, concepts and language we need to act as informed citizens. In response to secretary of defense Pete Hegseth’s order to remove “diversity” content from the department’s platforms, the Pentagon took down pages about the Holocaust, September 11, cancer awareness and suicide prevention. So too, the Department of Agriculture deleted entire datasets and resources that farmers relied on to identify ways of coping with heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires. Websites belonging to the Small Business Administration and Arlington National Cemetery scrubbed their platforms of photographs and references to women, LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color, including facts about American heroes such as Jackie Robinson or Gen Colin Powell.Taken together, these events of the past few weeks reveal an alarmingly rapid collapse of what gives the United States constitution life and meaning. Its words may remain unchanged, but its role in our lives is crumbling before our eyes. Looking for a decisive explosion or a moment of crisis – what physicists call a singularity – in the chaotic onrush of presidential provocations is a fool’s errand, one calculated to disarm the resistance without which we will surely be doomed.The seeds of our ongoing disintegration long precede Trump’s rise to power. They were planted decades ago by strategic politicians who dressed rightwing ideologies in conservative garments, permitting the darkest angels of our nature to take hold and to reach a climax in fake claims of a stolen election that led to an insurrection in our country’s capital, followed first by the Senate’s abdication of its duty in Trump’s second impeachment trial (on the bogus ground that the trial had begun too late to give the Senate jurisdiction) and next by the US supreme court’s gifting of Trump – and every future president – with a nearly absolute immunity transforming the office from one restrained by law to a source of virtually limitless power.Rarely noted is how this frightening power to ignore federal criminal law has been conferred not only on the president but on his legions of loyal lieutenants, from public officials to private militias. Because the constitution itself gives presidents an unbridled power to pardon others – a power Trump reveled in employing to free from prison the violent insurrectionists that he had himself helped unleash – we now live under a system in which any president can license his trusted followers to commit crimes to consolidate his power and wealth, making clear that a pardon awaits them should they face federal prosecution. The upshot is that privateers in league with the president can safely ignore federal laws criminalizing corrupt evasion of rules designed to protect public health and safety while they casually usurp powers the constitution gave to Congress, moving so fast and breaking so much that not even genuinely independent federal courts can keep pace with the mayhem.In his iconic poem The Hollow Men, TS Eliot a century ago famously wrote: “This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / … /Not with a bang but a whimper.” Rooted in our past, the anti-democracy virus has reached a fever pitch as it ravages the body politic and revises all traces of our history. It’s a virus we must fight with all the energy we can muster if we don’t want our system of self-government under law to die – not in a sudden explosion but with a quiet whimper.The tragedy is that too many politicians and organizations are caving in without a fight, leading others to follow suit. With each surrender, Trump and his minions not only grow more emboldened but cement their hold on power by cracking down on all who dare oppose them in court, including lawyers who come to the aid of the administration’s enemies.Without more courageous leaders – including Republican officeholders who fear being primaried by candidates backed by limitless wealth – and without more bravery on the part of corporate CEOs whose fortunes can be threatened by Trump, elite lawyers whose business can shrivel if Trump targets them, and ordinary citizens understandably fearing online threats and worse, this darkness will be our destiny as we are reduced to mere memories and then relegated to the vast wasteland of the forgotten.

      Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University professor and professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard Law School. Meriting special thanks and acknowledgment is his research assistant, Radhika M Kattula, a third-year law student at Harvard Law School. More