At first the Signal scandal was all about the comedy: A top-secret conversation among senior Trump administration officials regarding an imminent U.S. military strike in Yemen, effortlessly infiltrated by the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was inadvertently invited to join the chat – on Signal – by the President’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz.
Trump spokespeople, official and unofficial, have attempted to keep the focus there. Who amongst us has not at one time mistakenly added someone to a mailing list? Maybe one of Mr. Waltz’s staff was responsible. Or maybe Mr. Goldberg somehow wormed his way onto the chat by some subterfuge.
A moment’s thought, however, was enough for anyone not actually on the Trump payroll, officially or unofficially, to understand that this wasn’t the point. Whether Mr. Goldberg was invited or whether he invited himself, how could such a top-level discussion, on such a sensitive subject, be so easily penetrated?
Which is to say, what on Earth were all these senior Trump officials – 18 of them, including not only Mr. Waltz but the Vice President, JD Vance, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, and the director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard – doing discussing plans for a military attack … on Signal?
The app itself isn’t the issue: its encryption is regarded as first-rate. It’s the implication: an app is something you put on your cellphone. And a cellphone can easily be compromised by any self-respecting intelligence service. For this reason, conversations of this sort are usually discussed in the White House Situation Room. Or, if offsite, from within a secure room, known as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).
Yet here they were discussing all of this from wherever they happened to be, on their cellphones. And not government-issued, specially prepared devices,
but likely their personal cellphones. Some of them, as it emerged, were in foreign countries. The President’s negotiator on Ukraine and the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, for example,
was in Moscow.
As time went on, however, it became clear that the scandal was not limited to the security breach, as serious as it was. It was noticed that no one on the chat made any mention of the extraordinary nature of it. No one said “wait a minute, should we even be discussing a matter as secret as this on a forum as insecure as this?” Which implies what logic would suggest: that this was not the only such discussion to be held on Signal – that it was, in fact, routine.
Which in turn suggests that this was not a mistake, but deliberate policy: Trump administration officials have made a practice of holding sensitive policy discussions on Signal, on their personal cellphones. And why would they do that? To avoid leaving a record of them, or not one that could be accessible via freedom-of-information requests.
Government officials are ordinarily required to discuss government business on government phones, not only because they are more secure, but to ensure they keep records of their discussion. So the use of personal phones was a serious violation of the rules (on top of the egregious security breach). Signal transcriptions, moreover, can be set to auto-delete. Had Mr. Goldberg not been accidentally admitted, we might never have learned what was said – though foreign intelligence services undoubtedly have.
And it’s the content of the chats that make up the third broad category of malfeasance. There’s the unserious, jocular tone – complete with emojis – for something as deadly serious as a military strike: as if, as the British political commentator Alastair Campbell put it, they were planning a stag party.
There’s the obsessive disdain for Europe: at one point it is held up as a point against the strikes, against Houthi terrorists who had been attacking ships in the Suez canal, that European shipping companies would also benefit. There’s the revelation that one strike was aimed at destroying an entire apartment block in which one terrorist’s girlfriend lived: arguably a war crime.
The whole thing – the contempt for rules, the scorn for allies, the recklessness, the sheer incompetence – adds up to a composite portrait of the Trump administration at work. To which the finishing touch has been its response. Attacks on the messenger. Semantics about “war plans” versus “attack plans.” Claims that the story was a hoax, even after it had been admitted the conversation took place. Outright lies, including to a Congressional committee.
And zero accountability: no investigation, no admission of wrongdoing, and no one (so far) required to pay any price for having broken the law and imperilled American security. They really think they can just brazen this out. And the worst part of it is, they might be right.
