‘For There Is Nothing Hidden That Will Not Be Disclosed’

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic magazine, thought he was being punked. He got a text from someone claiming to be Michael Waltz, national security advisor in the Trump administration, inviting him into an 18-person group chat including the secretary of defense, the vice president, the White House chief of staff, secretary of the treasury, director of national intelligence, and director of the CIA. The subject of the chat was the planning and execution of a US military strike on Yemen.

Goldberg was sure it was a hoax or a prank because that’s not how any of this works. There are rules and laws — serious, go-to-prison type laws — for when and where military plans can be discussed. It’s illegal to just text about this stuff on your personal phone.

The chat group was set up using the Signal app, which is encrypted, and slightly more secure than just a basic texting app, but it’s still hackable, and still illegal to use for discussing war plans. Cabinet members leading the Pentagon and the CIA and the rest of the intelligence agencies would never use Signal for anything other than a text saying “Go to the nearest secure facility and get on an official secured device so we can talk.” It wouldn’t just be flagrantly illegal to use it for more than that, it would be colossally reckless and stupid. So Goldberg knew this invitation to a group chat had to be fake. He thought maybe it was a set-up by some outfit like Project Veritas or maybe even some form of entrapment trying to trick him into mishandling bogus classified intel.

But, well, nope. It wasn’t fake. They really were this flagrantly illegal and they really were this colossally reckless and stupid.

“Trump officials texted war plans against Houthis to group chat that included a journalist.”

Top national security officials for President Donald Trump, including his defense secretary, texted war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, the magazine reported in a story posted online Monday. The National Security Council said the text chain “appears to be authentic.”

Trump initially told reporters he was not aware that the highly sensitive information had been shared, 2 1/2 hours after it was reported. He later appeared to joke about the breach.

The material in the text chain “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported.

During the course of this group chat on their personal phones, CIA Director John Ratcliffe also mentioned a covert CIA operative by name.

Goldberg’s report on all of this was published yesterday on the Atlantic’s website, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.” The journalist was far more careful and judicious about the classified material shared in the chat than the cabinet members were. Goldberg doesn’t print the name of the agent Ratcliffe exposed, for example, because again that would be very illegal and very stupid and would put that agent’s safety and national security at risk.

But that’s what everyone other than Goldberg did in that group chat — something very illegal and very stupid that put American lives and national security at risk.

There are so many layers of illegal, stupid, and dangerous here. First we have the layer of conducting this discussion on a commercial texting app on their personal phones. Then we have the layer of — oopsie, we accidentally invited a journalist to listen in. And then there’s layer upon layer of that actual substance of the chat itself, in which these cabinet members and their peers at the highest levels of American government reveal themselves to be vapid, soulless, feckless idiots.

This is, I suspect, part of what this group finds appealing about using Signal for their group chat. The app can be set up to delete all of the texts after a short period of time, erasing any record of their embarrassing remarks.

That is, of course, also illegal. These are public officials doing the public’s business and that is a matter of public record — even when the discussions are classified. Classified records of state secrets and national security secrets must still be kept and recorded, by law, to prevent our government from operating like the Party in Orwell’s 1984.

So for those keeping score at home, the participants in this chat — other than the bewildered journalist — unambiguously broke the law in at least two ways: sharing classified information on insecure media, and deliberately violating open records laws.

I haven’t yet mentioned the vital national security interests that compelled all of these great leaders to decide to drop bombs on another country and its people. Nor have I mentioned any of the ways this action was designed to ensure it be a just, proportionate response that minimized harm to civilians.

I haven’t mentioned any of that because these great leaders didn’t mention any of that either. J.D. Vance’s Google-translate Catholicism apparently doesn’t include phrases like jus ad bello or jus in bello. And Signal doesn’t have emojis for any of that stuff.

Anyway, here’s the no-paywall archive version of Goldberg’s article. And here are some of the sharper commentaries I’ve read today about this story:

(I’ve been following the BBC’s coverage of this story, partly because I work nights and listen to a lot of the BBC, but partly because they highlight a lot of the international implications of all of this. Vance’s snide comments about Europe in the chat probably make him even less popular there than he is at Raymour & Flanigan.)