(UPDATE: Since I penned this, journalist Julian Sanchez noted proof in the text messages that #SignalGate wasn’t a one-off. People should be fired — at the very, very least.)
By now, every sentient American knows that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal chat that included the biggest names from Trump’s Clown Cabinet: alcoholic Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Li’l Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard, National Defense Director and valuable Russian asset. For some reason, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, racist White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, Gabbard’s Chief of Staff Joe Kent, and Steve Witkofff, special envoy to the Middle East and Russia, were also on this unsecured text chain
Granted, this is horrible enough. Signal, despite protestations to the contrary, is a commercial messaging app that is ridiculously easy to hack by a professional. But the really bad news is that these clowns have been at this for a while.
How do I know this? Because I can remember things.
Remember in October 2020, when out of the blue, general after admiral and general announced that they would not takes sides in an election? What an odd statement to make! It was almost as if they were responding to someone privately asking them to do just that! Oh, right! That’s just what happened!
So when I recently discovered that the Pentagon sent out a memo against using Signal a week before SignalGate exploded into the news, I remembered October 2020. Why would the Pentagon think to do that? After all, I worked for the Pentagon (don’t judge me!) in the 1980s — before Signal, before text chains, before group chats, before social media, before email or the Internet — and I would have known that using a commercial messaging app like Signal was an incredibly reckless violation of my oath to keep the nation’s secrets just that: secret. SCIFs — Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, specially designed rooms for handling and storing classified information — exist for a reason.
So why did the Pentagon send out a memo, titled “Signal Vulnerability,” which warns that Signal is being specifically targeted by foreign intelligence? Indeed, the memo (you can see it here at NPR) specifically cites Russian hackers’ ability “to view every message sent by the unwitting user in real time, bypassing the end-to-end encryption” on Signal. The memo also points out the Pentagon employees aren’t even to use Signal “for unclassified accountability/recall exercises” or “to store nonpublic unclassified information” (boldface in original). So what these fools did would be a crime if anyone but a #MAGAhire had done it, even if it had really been unclassified. Although how a discussion that names an active spy could be unclassified beggars belief.
It’s obvious why the Pentagon sent this memo against using Signal on the job. Some responsible person realized that Trump’s Clown Cabinet was using Signal all of the time for top-secret deliberations. SignalGate wasn’t a one-off; it was modus operandi at #AlcoholicPete Hegseth’s Department of Defense. They feared leaving a freedom-of-information trail by which Americans could discover what they were doing much more than they worried about Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or North Korean eavesdroppers. The bad news is that no one can really know how much information has been revealed to foreign spies. What we do know is that no ally will want to share any intelligence with us, as it basically amounts to sharing it with their adversaries. And who can blame them?
I also remember when Europe’s adversaries were our adversaries and our government feared our enemies more than its own citizens. It’s going to be a long, dangerous four years.
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