US national security

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Democrats decry reported dismissal of NSA director Tim Haugh

      by

      Top congressional Democrats are protesting against the firing of Gen Tim Haugh as director of the National Security Agency (NSA), with one lawmaker saying the decision “makes all of us less safe”.Haugh and his civilian deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, have been dismissed from their roles, the Washington Post reported late on Thursday, with CNN reporting likewise, both outlets citing multiple unnamed officials and other senior sources close to the matter who had requested anonymity.US defense department spokesperson Sean Parnell on Friday thanked Haugh “for his decades of service to our nation, culminating as US cyber command commander and National Security Agency director”.“We wish him and his family well,” Parnell’s statement said, confirming Haugh’s departure without elaborating on why.The ousting had not been officially confirmed by the government or the individuals by Friday afternoon, but the NSA website had been updated with both Haugh and Noble no longer listed in their roles.Lt Gen William J Hartman is now listed there as acting director of the NSA and Sheila Thomas as his acting deputy.Haugh also headed US Cyber Command, which coordinates the Pentagon’s cybersecurity operations. Hartman has been appointed acting head of the command, according to its website.The NSA notified congressional leadership and top lawmakers of the national security committees of Haugh’s firing late on Wednesday but did not give reasons, the Associated Press reported, citing a source. Senior military leaders were only informed on Thursday, the news agency said.The NSA declined to comment and referred the Guardian to the Department of Defense, which said it would provide more information when it became available.Outrage from critics was fulsome. Senator Mark Warner, vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement: “General Haugh has served our country in uniform, with honor and distinction, for more than 30 years. At a time when the United States is facing unprecedented cyber threats … how does firing him make Americans any safer?”Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member on the House intelligence committee, said he was “deeply disturbed by the decision”.“I have known General Haugh to be an honest and forthright leader who followed the law and put national security first – I fear those are precisely the qualities that could lead to his firing in this administration,” Himes added. “The intelligence committee and the American people need an immediate explanation for this decision, which makes all of us less safe.”Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said Donald Trump “has given a priceless gift to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea by purging competence from our national security leadership”.“In addition to the other military leaders and national security officials Trump has fired, he is sending a chilling message throughout the ranks: don’t give your best military advice, or you may face consequences,” Reed added.Earlier on Thursday, Donald Trump said he had fired “some” White House National Security Council officials, a move that came a day after far-right activist Laura Loomer raised concerns directly to him about staff loyalty.Loomer, during her Oval Office conversation with Trump, urged the president to purge staffers she deemed insufficiently loyal to his “make America great again” agenda, according to several people familiar with the matter. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive personnel manner.Loomer posted on X in the first moments of Friday morning: “NSA Director Tim Haugh and his deputy Wendy Noble have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired.”She added a screed about how they were hired by Joe Biden during his presidency and were, she said, “hand picked” by Mark Milley, then chair of the joint chiefs of staff, the most senior uniformed officer in the military. Milley served Trump in his first term in the White House but has since turned fiercely critical, calling the president dangerous and “fascist to the core”, and was fired in the early days of Trump’s second term. The 47th US president then also revoked Milley’s security clearance. Biden, the 46th US president, had preemptively pardoned Milley in his final days in office, following threats from Trump that the veteran was treasonous and should face the death penalty.Loomer added Haugh was “referred for firing” and Noble was Haugh’s “Obama loving protégé” who was nominated by Biden and promoted diversity, equity and inclusion at the agency. Loomer noted: “This is called VETTING”.She also said Noble was a protege of James Clapper, director of national intelligence in Barack Obama’s presidency, and said Clapper should be in prison.Trump spoke to reporters on Air Force One on Thursday afternoon after the earlier firing of six national security agency staffers below the level of Haugh and Noble, based on recommendations from Loomer, a extremist cheerleader for Trump and a white supremacist with an incendiary social media presence who has no political experience outside of unsuccessfully running for US Congress in Florida twice.“Always we’re letting go of people,” Trump said. “People that we don’t like or people that we don’t think can do the job or people that may have loyalties to somebody else.”The firings come as Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz continues to fight calls for his ouster after using the publicly available encrypted Signal app to discuss planning for the sensitive 15 March military operation targeting Houthi militants in Yemen.Warner said on Thursday night: “It is astonishing, too, that President Trump would fire the nonpartisan, experienced leader of the National Security Agency while still failing to hold any member of his team accountable for leaking classified information on a commercial messaging app – even as he apparently takes staffing direction on national security from a discredited conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office.”Haugh met last month with Elon Musk, whose so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, has roiled the federal government by slashing personnel and budgets at dozens of agencies. In a statement, the NSA said the meeting was intended to ensure both organizations were “aligned” with the new administration’s priorities.Haugh had led both the NSA and Cyber Command since 2023. Both departments play leading roles in the nation’s cybersecurity. The NSA also supports the military and other national security agencies by collecting and analysing a vast amount of data and information globally.Cyber Command is known as America’s first line of defence in cyberspace and also plans offensive cyber-operations for potential use against adversaries. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth recently ordered the office to pause some offensive cyber-operations against Russia, in another sign of how Trump’s administration is transforming the work of the nation’s intelligence community.Renée Burton, a cybersecurity expert previously working for the NSA, told CNN the removal of the personnel was “alarming” and the disruption would “expose the country to new risk”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      I worked in Trump’s first administration. Here’s why his team is using Signal | Kevin Carroll

      by

      No senior US government official in the now-infamous “Houthi PC Small Group” Signal chat seemed new to that kind of group, nor surprised by the sensitivity of the subject discussed in that insecure forum, not even when the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, chimed in with details of a coming airstrike. No one objected – not the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was abroad and using her personal cellphone to discuss pending military operations; not even the presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, who was in Moscow at the time. Yet most of these officials enjoy the luxury of access to secure government communications systems 24/7/365.Reasonable conclusions may be drawn from these facts. First, Trump’s national security cabinet commonly discusses secret information on insecure personal devices. Second, sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China intercept such communications, especially those sent or received in their countries. Third, as a result, hostile intelligence services now probably possess blackmail material regarding these officials’ indiscreet past conversations on similar topics. Fourth, as a first-term Trump administration official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request. And fifth, no one seems to have feared being investigated by the justice department for what appears to be a violation of the Espionage Act’s Section 793(f), which makes gross negligence in mishandling classified information a felony; the FBI director, Kash Patel, and attorney general, Pam Bondi, quickly confirmed that hunch. Remarkably, the CIA director John Ratcliffe wouldn’t even admit to Congress that he and his colleagues had made a mistake.The knock-on effects of this are many. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, needs to address his colleagues’ characterization of European partners as “pathetic” with foreign ministers now dubious of the US’s intentions. Allies already hesitant to share their countries’ secrets with the US, because of valid counterintelligence concerns regarding Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin, will clam up even more rather than risk their sources being compromised by Trump’s appointees. Gabbard and Ratcliffe may have perjured themselves before Congress regarding whether their Signal chat included classified national defense information; certainly, their credibility on Capitol Hill is shredded. As a former CIA case officer, I suspect these directors’ own subordinates will prefer not to share restricted handling information with them going forward. Hegseth, confirmed as secretary by a vote of 51-50 despite concerns over his character and sobriety, lost any moral authority to lead the defense department by reflexively lying about his misconduct, claiming that the story by Jeffrey Goldberg, the unsuspecting Atlantic editor improvidently included in the text chain, is somehow a “hoax” despite the fact the White House contemporaneously confirmed its authenticity.Trump dismisses this scandal, now under investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general, as a witch-hunt, and his followers will fall in line. But every senator who voted to confirm these national security officials, despite doubts regarding their temperaments and qualifications, quietly knows that they own part of this debacle. For fear of facing Republican primary challengers funded by Elon Musk, these senators failed in their solemn constitutional duty to independently provide wise advice and consent regarding nominations to the US’s most important war cabinet posts. How would the senators have explained their misfeasance to service members’ bereaved families – their constituents, perhaps – had the Houthis used information from the Signal chat, such as the time a particular target was to be engaged, to reorient their antiaircraft systems to intercept the inbound aircraft?I happen to have served in Yemen as a sensitive activities officer for special operations command (central). Conspicuous in their absence from the Signal chat were uniformed officers responsible for the recent combat mission: the acting chair of the joint chiefs of staff Adm Christopher Grady, central command’s Gen Michael Kurilla and special operations command’s Gen Bryan Fenton. These good men would have raised the obvious objection: loose talk on insecure phones about a coming operation jeopardizes the lives of US sailors and marines standing watch on warships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, naval aviators flying over the beach towards the target, and likely special operators, intelligence officers and human sources working in the shadows on the ground.You don’t need 30-plus years in uniform to know that holding a detailed yet insecure discussion about a pending military mission is wrong; the participants in the chat knew, too. They just didn’t care, not as much as they cared about keeping their communications from being legally discoverable. They’re safe in the knowledge that in a new era without benefit of the rule of law, Patel’s FBI and Bondi’s justice department will never bring charges against them, for a crime which uniformed service members are routinely prosecuted for vastly smaller infractions. As the attorney general made plain in her remarks about this matter, federal law enforcement is now entirely subservient to Trump’s personal and political interests.Most senior US government officials in 2025 are, unfortunately, far gone from the fine old gentleman’s tradition of honorable resignation. But participants in the Signal chat should consider the Hollywood producer character Jack Woltz’s pained observation to the mafia lawyer Tom Hagen in The Godfather about his indiscreetly wayward mistress: “A man in my position cannot afford to be made to look ridiculous.” Trump, the justice department and the Republican Congress may not make them resign, but to the US’s allies and adversaries, and to their own subordinates, these officials now look ridiculous.

      Kevin Carroll served as senior counselor to the former homeland security secretary John Kelly and as a CIA and army officer More

    • 200 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump fires six national security staffers after far-right activist Laura Loomer urged him to in meeting

      by

      Donald Trump fired six national security council staffers after an unusual meeting in the Oval Office where the far-right activist Laura Loomer presented opposition research against a number of staffers that she said showed they were disloyal to the US president, according to two people familiar with the matter.The firings included three staffers who had been brought on by national security adviser Mike Waltz – an extraordinary situation where Loomer appeared to have more sway over NSC personnel than the official in charge of running the agency. It also undercut Waltz’s position to have his allies axed from under him.Loomer brought a booklet of papers laying out the perceived disloyalty of about a dozen staffers, including Waltz’s principal deputy Alex Wong, to the meeting that was also attended by Vice-President JD Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Waltz himself.The fired officials included Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence who previously worked for now Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the Senate intelligence committee; and Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs who previously served as Waltz’s legislative director in Congress, the people said.While the firings appeared arbitrary, one of the people said that the White House looked through Loomer’s opposition research and verified parts of it. Ultimately, it found that one NSC official had recently criticized Trump on social media and others had donated or supported a Democratic political candidate.The firings did not include Wong, who has been one of Loomer’s top targets. Loomer has vilified Wong over the work of his wife, Candice, at the justice department that involved prosecuting January 6 Capitol rioters. Loomer has also publicly suggested that Wong has sympathies to the Chinese communist party.Loomer did not immediately respond to questions sent by text about the alleged sins of the NSC officials she targeted. Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the NSC, did not respond to a request for comment.But in the days since Waltz inadvertently added a journalist from the Atlantic to a Signal group chat, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared updates about a US military strike against the Houthis in Yemen, Loomer suggested Wong and other career NSC officials were trying to sabotage Trump by causing a scandal.She baselessly claimed Wong deliberately added the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the sensitive chat “as part of a foreign opp to embarrass the Trump administration on behalf of China”. (The White House’s final internal conclusion, the Guardian has reported, was that Waltz added Goldberg by mistake himself.)Loomer has been part of a group of Trump allies to disparage Waltz and his team, calling them “neocons” – short for neo conservatives – as a pejorative term to castigate them for being too hawkish and eager to project US military power abroad, at odds with Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.The online vilification of Waltz and his team took a turn on Wednesday when Loomer appeared at the White House for the meeting. It was not immediately certain how Loomer was cleared to access the White House complex given she lacks a “hard pass” even as a reporter, a sore issue she has complained about in recent weeks.Loomer sat directly across from Trump in the Oval Office as she made her pitch to him directly to remove the people she was targeting. The New York Times reported that Republican congressman Scott Perry, who had his own concerns about staffers in the administration, was also trying to meet with Trump at the same time.The effect on Waltz was not clear. He left the White House with Trump on Marine One on Thursday, which signaled support from the president, who last week declined to fire Waltz over the Signal chat episode. Waltz has also recently shown more deference to Wiles, the chief of staff, in an effort to win her support, the people said.But Waltz’s political enemies point out that Waltz survived the Signal chat episode principally because Trump was unwilling to give the news media a victory, and not because of his confidence in Waltz. His main ally is also perceived to be Senator Lindsey Graham, as opposed to a network of allies inside Trump’s inner circle. More

    • 200 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Mike Waltz’s team set up at least 20 Signal chats for national security work – report

      by

      Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and his team have created at least 20 different group chats on the encrypted messaging app Signal to coordinate sensitive national security work, sources tell Politico.The revelation, which cites four people with direct knowledge of the practice, follows heightened scrutiny of the administration’s handling of sensitive information after the Atlantic recently published messages from a chat that included the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, sharing operational details of deadly strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen.Those anonymous sources told Politico the Signal chats covered a wide range of policy areas, including Ukraine, China, Gaza, broader Middle East policy, Africa and Europe. All four individuals reported seeing “sensitive information” discussed in these forums, though none said they were aware of classified material being shared.Over the last few days, Waltz’s flippant nature over the protection of national security secrets has been exposed. The Washington Post reported on documents revealing that Waltz’s team had been conducting government business through personal Gmail accounts.The White House has again defended the practice, with a national security council spokesperson, Brian Hughes, telling Politico that Signal was “not banned from government devices” and was automatically installed on some agencies’ phones.“It is one of the approved methods of communicating but is not the primary or even secondary,” Hughes said, adding that any claim of classified information being shared was “100% untrue.”The insistence by administration officials that none of the messages were classified, including past remarks by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and Hegseth, fly in the face of the defense department’s own rulebook on what would count as classified.In the earlier chat, Hegseth shared specific operational details about military strikes in Yemen, including launch times for F-18 fighter jets and Tomahawk missiles. These details, according to the former state department attorney Brian Finucane, who advised on past strikes on Yemen, would typically be classified based on his experience.Others in the national security establishment have similarly warned that using a messaging app like Signal could potentially violate federal record-keeping laws if chats are automatically deleted, and could compromise operational security if a phone is seized.Despite the earlier controversies, Leavitt indicated on Monday that Trump stood firmly behind his national security adviser, and that an investigation into how Waltz accidentally added a journalist to a sensitive chat had been closed. More

    • 175 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Goldberg dismisses Waltz’s Signal leak defense: ‘Numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones’

      by

      Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg has dismissed the explanation offered by national security adviser Mike Waltz for how he was included in a Trump administration group text chat about – and in advance of – the recent bombing of Houthi rebels in Yemen.Goldberg said Waltz’s theory that his contact was “sucked in” to his phone via “somebody else’s contact” was implausible.“This isn’t The Matrix,” Goldberg told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday’s Meet the Press, referring to the classic science fiction movie about humans unknowingly living in a simulated reality. “Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones.“I don’t know what he’s talking about there.”Goldberg continued: “You know, very frequently in journalism, the most obvious explanation is the explanation. My phone number was in his phone because my phone number is in his phone.”Goldberg made waves when the magazine, over two days beginning 24 March, published details of a group chat that included senior Trump administration officials discussing a then imminent US attack on Houthi installations and senior personnel.The chat, on the Signal app, unnerved many in Washington about the security precautions being taken by neophyte administration officials to ensure national security, triggering several days of headlines over whether the texts amounted to a breach.Donald Trump on Sunday repeated his position that the disclosures were a mistake – and the president denied reports that Waltz had offered to resign. “No, he didn’t,” Trump said. “There was no reason for him to.”Earlier, Trump said Waltz is “a very good man, and he will continue to do a good job”.On Sunday, Goldberg claimed that Waltz is “telling everyone that he’s never met me or spoken to me – that’s simply not true”. Waltz had said during a meeting with Trump and ambassadors at the White House that he “never met” Goldberg.“There’s a lot of journalists … who have made big names for themselves making up lies about this president,” Waltz said, without offering evidence. Referring to Goldberg, he added: “This one in particular I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with, and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room.”The national security council (NSC) confirmed the authenticity of the messages and said it was reviewing how Goldberg got into the Waltz-initiated chat. Theories range from unintentionally selecting Goldberg’s number; his number being under the name of a security official supposed to be included; to intentional sabotage.But Goldberg told NBC News: “This has become a somewhat farcical situation. There’s no subterfuge here. My number was in his phone. He mistakenly added me to the group chat. There we go.”Democratic US senator Mark Warner continued to press the issue on Sunday, saying the Republican White House officials involved in the Signal breach risked American lives.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“If you had been a traditional military officer or a CIA caseworker and you were this sloppy and careless with this classified information, you would be fired,” Warner, of Virginia, told host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s This Week. “No doubt about it.”Warner – a member of the Senate intelligence committee – said he, too, uses Signal because it is safer than texting. “I actually encourage people to use Signal. But that still doesn’t mean, because it’s safer, you can put classified information” on there, he added.Congressman Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican and former chairperson of the US House’s intelligence committee, told the same outlet that he welcomed a review into what has come to be known as Signalgate and “whether or not these types of conversations should occur”.Nonetheless, he said he considered the Houthi strikes “a great operation”.Susan Rice, who served as the national security adviser to former president Barack Obama, told the MeidasTouch podcast that the leak was “extraordinarily reckless” and “unprecedented”.Rice said even the existence of the conversations is classified.“This would never be tolerated in a normal administration,” Rice said. “They’d be fired on the spot.” More

    • 225 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 188 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      The Signal chat exposes the administration’s incompetence – and its pecking order | Sidney Blumenthal

      by

      On 13 March, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who was the policy director for two secretaries of defense and was a member of the House intelligence committee, sent a message on the commercial Signal app: “Team – establishing a principles group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours.” “The Houthis PC small group” would oversee a US air attack on the Houthis in Yemen.Despite Waltz’s extensive professional background, he misspelled “principals” as “principles” – perhaps an ordinary typo, but symptomatic of the shambles to come. Although the secretaries of defense, state and treasury, the director of national intelligence, the CIA director, the vice-president, and the president’s chief of staff were among the 18 people included, neither the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, who is a statutory member of the principals committee of the National Security Council, nor any military designee was invited into this group. Instead, the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was sent a link. Waltz noted: “Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days.”The Atlantic’s publication of Goldberg’s article about the Signal group’s exchanges was followed by a spray of attempts to cover it up. Trump and the rest of his administration simply denied that anything classified had been released; there were no “war plans”, it was a “hoax”, Goldberg was “scum”, “a loser” and “discredited”, and what about Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton? Which prompted Goldberg to publish the detailed war plans he had withheld in his first article. He was the only responsible person involved in the incident.Quite apart from the glaring incompetence and illegality of the whole affair – Goldberg’s careless inclusion, the fact that a provision of the Espionage Act (18 USC § 793) criminalizes “gross negligence” for mishandling classified national security material, and that operating on Signal with timed deletion of messages violates the preservation of records for the National Archives – the conversation pulled back the curtain on the White House.The transcript exposed the internal pecking order of the Trump administration and its actual chain of command, if it could be called anything that regular. In the end, the final decision-maker within the group to whom the others deferred was not any cabinet secretary or the chief of staff. They turned to “SM” – Stephen Miller – the deputy chief of staff who is Trump’s zealous enforcer. The chief of staff, Susie Wiles, came across as a cheerleader. Miller was the one who gave the stamp of approval. He conveyed Trump’s word. For all intents and purposes, Stephen Miller acted as the de facto president.The desultory discussion on Signal also highlighted the juvenile towel-snapping bro culture at the top of the administration. The Fox News personalities in the cabinet and the others who have habituated themselves to blathering forceful opinions appeared in the leaked transcript to have seamlessly carried over their habits of loud and thoughtless talk. Above all, they don’t know when not to speak; nor do they know what they reveal about themselves when they do. They don’t know how to conduct themselves as serious people in the room. Their incompetence comes naturally.About the military plan on the eve of being executed, JD Vance opined: “I think we are making a mistake.” By venturing his view at this advanced point in the operation, he showed that he had been out of the loop. Vice-presidents since Walter Mondale, under President Jimmy Carter, have been made indispensable figures in important decisions, especially involving national security. But Vance sounded like an outsider, a guest on a podcast.He went on about how the Houthis menacing the trade in the Hormuz Strait affected Europe more than the United States. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” he said. Vance felt that it was Trump who was out of the loop or assumed Trump’s ignorance. If only Trump understood his own contradictions.But Vance conceded: “I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself.” Where did he think he would voice his dissent, Joe Rogan’s show? He did not know Goldberg was already listening in. Then Vance suggested: “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.”“There is nothing time sensitive driving the time line,” piped up Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, lending support to Vance. Kent has been an overlooked figure in the scandal. He has an extensive history of associations with extremist domestic terrorist organizations. As a Republican congressional candidate, he paid a consulting fee to a member of the Proud Boys; he has also been close to the Christian nationalist Patriot Prayer group involved in violent street brawls in Portland; defended the white supremacist Nick Fuentes; and stated: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with there being a white people special interest group,” during an interview with a group called the American Populist Union. In 2022, after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Kent called him “very reasonable”. When Kent ran for the House that year, after his ties to the far right were exposed, he claimed he had distanced himself from such groups. Kent was the deputy of the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, on the Signal group.Waltz joined in the Europe-bashing with talking points to buttress Trump’s zero-sum mercantilist view of the world, explaining: “Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.”Vance broke in to say that if Hegseth wanted “to do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”Hegseth agreed: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” He added: “Question is timing.”Enter Stephen Miller. “As I heard it,” he said, “the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”“As I heard it …” Miller spoke as if he were the only one to hear Trump. No one else said they had. Miller was definitive. He was more than the Trump whisperer. He was the voice of Trump.Miller also chimed in on the chorus of contempt for Europe. It was as though Europe was the enemy. The allies are not really allies; they are renters, and the rent should be raised.On 15 March, Hegseth returned with an “update” of precise details of the attack. “I will say a prayer for victory,” he wrote. It was a go. As it proceeded, Waltz chronicled the targets hit on Signal.Susie Wiles weighed in: “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.”Waltz posted three emojis – a fist, a flag and a fire.“Great work all. Powerful start,” said Miller. He was the one to give the praise. He apparently had the authority.In Russia, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, responded with two prayer emojis, a flexed muscle emoji and two American flag emojis.Afterward, Witkoff, a former New York real estate operator and Trump golfing partner, gave an interview to Tucker Carlson, the far-right podcaster who is highly influential with JD Vance and Hegseth, in which Witkoff said he “liked” Vladimir Putin, who was not “a bad guy”, “straight up”, and had presented him with a portrait of Trump to take home – “such a gracious moment”.Proclaimed a “success”, the operation itself will do little to quell the Iran-backed Houthis, who resumed their missile attacks on shipping in the Hormuz Strait after Benjamin Netanyahu, seeking to maintain his fragile grasp on power, abandoned the ceasefire in Gaza, which Trump declared he “fully supports” after doing nothing to sustain it. Instead, Trump proposed turning the ravaged Palestinian territory into a beachfront property, a “riviera of the Middle East”. Trump shared an AI-generated video of himself and Netanyahu lolling on the beach with dollars raining down and half-naked dancing women. Trump’s policy, of which the Houthi strike supposedly demonstrates “success”, has further entangled the US in cycles of violence without any clear path forward.As soon as Goldberg’s article appeared, the cover-up effort began. “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic; to me it’s a magazine that is going out of business,” Trump said. “I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?”Republicans in the Congress stammered or were silent. At last, the senator Roger Wicker, of Mississippi, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, called for an expedited report from the Pentagon’s inspector general. Unfortunately, there is no such inspector general – at least not a permanent one. Trump fired him on 27 January along with 16 others across federal agencies and departments, without reason, contrary to the Inspector General Act of 1978, tightened in 2022. “I don’t know [the fired inspectors general],” Trump said, “but some people thought that some were unfair or were not doing the job.” For now, there is an acting inspector general.The scandal might have been avoided if Hegseth could have consulted with the Pentagon’s legal authorities, the judge advocate generals. But he fired the top Jag officers of the army, navy and air force three weeks before the Signal group was formed.Nor did Hegseth, or anyone else, apparently think to include the joint chiefs of staff, who just might have objected to the obvious sloppiness and illegality of the Signal setup. But on 21 February, Trump fired the chair of the joint chiefs, the four-star general CQ Brown Jr, the chief of naval operations and the air force vice-chief of staff. He had already removed the chief of the US Coast Guard.Brown, the former air force chief, was the first Black person to head a branch of the armed forces. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt,” said Hegseth in dismissing Brown. Adm Christopher Grady, serving as the acting chair of the joint chiefs, was not sent the invitation for the Signal group that Goldberg received.To replace Brown, Trump has nominated a retired three-star general, Dan Caine, whom Trump insists on calling “Razin’ Caine”. But no one raised Caine to participate in the chat.He might be grateful to have been ignored. Instead of the three-star general, Waltz mobilized three emojis.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

    • 238 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Let’s put it in language the Signal leakers will understand: what a bunch of pathetic sleazebags | Emma Brockes

      by

      The Maga-fication of American political discourse, which started, arguably, with Donald Trump mocking a disabled reporter in 2015, peaked this week with news of Pete Hegseth referring to European countries in the leaked Signal chat as “PATHETIC”, and enjoyed a detour last Tuesday when Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and former running mate of Kamala Harris, appeared at a town hall in Wisconsin and called Elon Musk “a dipshit”. (This is not the first time he has referred to Musk this way. Right before the election last year, Walz told a crowd: “Look, Elon’s on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit.”)Parking for a moment the perfection of the phrase “skipping like a dipshit” to capture Musk’s very particular style of movement and speech, the range of what can and can’t be said in politics has clearly, radically changed. When you look back on the phrase that caused Hillary Clinton so much trouble in 2016 – “basket of deplorables” – it sounds like a quote from an 18th-century novel. “Take that, sir! You and your basket of deplorables!” Now we have Trump referring to Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor mistakenly added to the Signal chat, as a “sleazebag”, and Hegseth, the US defense secretary, telling JD Vance that he fully shares the vice-president’s “loathing of European free-loading”. We are millimetres away from someone shouting “asshole” across the floor of the Senate.The Signal chat, obviously, wasn’t supposed to be public, and responding to the leak this week has put the White House in a delicious bind – or rather, a bind that we might have enjoyed as delicious had it not underscored just how petrifyingly stupid Trump’s team really is. On Wednesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, had simultaneously to dismiss further revelations from the Atlantic designed to expose the White House lie that none of the information discussed was classified, while slamming the magazine for leaking “sensitive information”. Well, Karoline, which is it?The new information shared by the Atlantic on Wednesday was, to use government-approved language, freaking MIND-BLOWING. Two hours before the Yemeni bombing raid, Hegseth, Vance and national security adviser Mike Waltz went into extraordinary detail as to the exact timing, nature and target of the bombings. “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s),” wrote Hegseth, followed by a stream of similar details. After the release of the information on Wednesday, retired military brass lined up in the US to tell cable news channels: “There is no question this is classified.”And while it remained deeply unfortunate for the Trump administration that, of all the people they might have mistakenly cc-ed into the group, it happened to be a serious journalist like Jeffrey Goldberg, given the frat boy tenor of the exchange, it could also have been a lot worse. We should, surely, be grateful that Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who organised the group on Signal, didn’t do that thing – look, we’ve all done it – where you inadvertently send a bitchy message about someone to the person in question, or in this case a message outlining a plan to drop a bomb on their head to the Houthi rebel commander target. Or as Waltz described him, in the style of a man shooting the breeze at the water cooler, “their top missile guy”. One assumes the only reason that guy wasn’t in the chat, too, is that he hadn’t gotten around to signing up for Signal.It’s not the rudeness, of course, it’s the flippancy that terrifies. The tone of the messages flying between the most powerful people in the world via an unsecure messaging app and on subjects of vital national security was that of someone idly texting with one hand while throwing and catching a hacky sack in the other. At one point, per Wednesday’s new trove, Mike Waltz wrote “typing too fast” and it must have taken every shred of collective will power in the group for no one to reply, “Sausage fingers!”Waltz, by the way, is the figure who has come closest to saying sorry for the mess, remarking on Fox News on Tuesday that he took “full responsibility” for the error. But then he ruined the vanishingly rare moment of appearing to be the only adult in the room by referring to Goldberg – a hero without whom none of us would know any of this had happened – as “scum”. And, sadly, back we went to square one.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More