As a seven-term member of Congress, not much surprises me. But I found myself in utter disbelief this week after reading the now infamous story in The Atlantic by the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. Creating the “Houthi PC Small Group” Signal chat – in which President Donald Trump’s top U.S. national security officials shared sensitive attack plans in a text chat that included the journalist – must be the dumbest move by Team Trump so far, though it’s still only March.
What these highest national security officials did violates all logic – and rules, policies and procedures governing sensitive information. In an October 2023 memo, the Department of Defense defined apps such as Signal as “NOT authorized to access, transmit, or process non-public DoD information.”
Instead, the U.S. government mandates using approved classified communication systems to discuss secret data, such as meeting in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, the official term for a secure room or data center that guards against electronic surveillance and data leakage.
It’s bad enough that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared attack plans in an unauthorized app rather than in a SCIF. But inviting an outsider into the chat, as national security adviser Mike Waltz has admitted doing, is next-level idiocy. And not one person in the group thought to check who the person identified only as “JG” was?
If Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency wants to make government work better, maybe Musk should hire a person who checks on the identities of all people in group chats. There were 18 people in that Signal group chat who have a duty to protect our nation, not counting the magazine editor they included in the chat. How do we know this isn’t the first time they’ve made this mistake?
The answer is that we don’t. The Trump administration claims to champion transparency, but they were likely using Signal to avoid transparency and oversight. In secret training videos made by those behind Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump to remake the federal government, one trainer recommends not putting government communications in writing so they can’t be archived or available for oversight. The videos were published by investigative reporters at ProPublica last year.
It is easy to call this amateur hour. But like everything with the second Trump administration, it’s much worse than that because of the incompetence and probable ill-intent involved. To compound this monumental moronic mistake, the president, the defense secretary, the CIA director, the director of national intelligence and other top officials have denied, excused or minimized the seriousness of what happened.
Where do we go next? We need complete transparency about what happened. It can’t just be Democratic members of Congress demanding this. Every single Republican lawmaker who served in the military or intelligence community must seek answers. We need to know everyone and everything that was in this group chat. We need to know how many other similar group chats exist. Most importantly, will the Trump administration continue to conduct operations with such pitiful regard for security?
As for the individuals who recklessly exposed our troops, they should never handle classified information again. This is a monumental mistake, not one where you get a do-over. They should all be fired. That is to be expected when anyone in the U.S. government who holds a security clearance and shows such poor judgment with sensitive information.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Hegseth and the other lost toys from the Mar-a-Lago trash heap are incapable of protecting our critical intelligence from foreign adversaries. These clowns won’t even own up to their mistakes.
If no one loses their jobs over this – if this is an acceptable standard for those entrusted with sensitive state matters – we are in deep trouble as a nation.
Waltz, who started the group chat and added Goldberg to it, apparently inadvertently, claims he has never met Goldberg. If he is unaware of any of the contacts in his phone, that is a national security risk. God help us if he receives a text from a scammer posing as a Nigerian prince.