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The defense of the United States is a serious business. Breaches of national security are especially dangerous. So perhaps I should not have laughed at the reactions of Donald Trump and his staff and Cabinet members to the revelations by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and staff writer Shane Harris about a group chat on Signal (one that accidentally included Jeff) dedicated to planning strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
I laughed because I am a former government employee and Senate staffer with a fair amount of experience in dealing with classified information, and the administration’s position that nothing in the chat was classified is ludicrous. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth added a bit of topspin to that position on Monday when he got off a plane in Honolulu and, seemingly in a panic, fulminated against Jeff and tried to deny that any “war plans” were shared in the chat.
Over the next 24 hours, the excuses became even more laughable. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz went on Fox News, accepted “full responsibility,” and called Jeff “scum.” But then Waltz suggested that The Atlantic’s editor in chief had perhaps hacked or schemed his way into the chat, and that this possibility had to be investigated.
What’s funny—again, in an awful way—is that Waltz is the person who invited Jeff into the Signal group. (If you’ve never seen the “hot-dog man” meme, it’s an image of a guy in a hot-dog costume pleading with a crowd to find the person responsible for crashing a nearby wrecked hot-dog car. It’s being used all over social media in relation to this story, and for good reason.) Also appallingly funny is that the president’s own national security adviser doesn’t seem to understand that discussing on an app the details of a U.S. military strike and then admitting that a random person could find himself in the middle of such a discussion—it’s not like he waltzed his way in, if you’ll pardon the expression—makes this whole story even worse.
This morning, the full context of one of the most stunning security breaches in modern military affairs became even clearer when Jeff and Shane released the texts. The messages show that the entire conversation should have been classified and held either in a secure location or over secure communications. (I held a security clearance for most of my career, and I saw information far less specific than this marked as classified.) Hegseth, in particular, was a volcano of military details that are always considered highly classified, spewing red-hot information about the strikes, the equipment to be used, the intelligence collected in deciding on targets, and the sequencing of events.
[Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris: Here are the attack plans that Trump’s advisers shared on Signal]
None of this is funny. If any of this had leaked at the moment Hegseth blathered it over Signal, American servicepeople could have died. (As my friend David French at The New York Times wrote on Monday, if Hegseth had any honor at all, he wouldn’t wait to be fired. He’d resign.)
But I couldn’t help it: I laughed at the reaction of top Trump officials. As I read White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s grammatically challenged statement, in which she claimed that information included in the conversation was “sensitive” but not “classified,” I thought she was trying to engage in some sort of not particularly convincing parsing. But listening to her briefing later in the day, I realized that Leavitt doesn’t seem to know the first thing about classified information. Unfortunately, apparently neither does Hegseth, nor CIA Director John Ratcliffe, nor any of the other people involved in this mess.
And I’m not the only one laughing. During a hearing today, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois tried to get the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, to admit that the messages Hegseth sent over Signal did in fact include classified details of weapons systems. Kruse hemmed and hawed, until Krishnamoorthi just chuckled.
That didn’t stop Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesperson, from putting out yet another howler of a statement today, claiming that the “hoax-peddlers at the Atlantic have already abandoned their ‘war plans’ claim” and that the Signal messages “confirm there were no classified materials or war plans shared. The Secretary was merely updating the group on a plan that was underway and had already been briefed through official channels.”
Either Parnell does not know that this is nonsense or he’s intentionally obfuscating. (The strikes were not, in fact, under way, and American forces would have been more vulnerable to enemy action without the element of surprise. The Atlantic has also not “abandoned” any of the claims in its reporting.) The administration is, in effect, banking on the reality that most people never encounter military terms or classified information, so I’ll explain what it’s like to deal with those kinds of materials under more responsible administrations.
Ratcliffe continues to insist that no classified information was discussed in the chat—despite the fact that he revealed the name of a CIA intelligence officer. (Jeff and Shane, in accordance with a request from the CIA, did not release that one message in this morning’s revelations, another example of how The Atlantic has been more concerned and careful about such matters than Ratcliffe and the other participants in the chat.) The names of intelligence officers are carefully protected, and I’m pretty sure I know the difference here, because I was once married to a CIA analyst. She was an open employee, meaning she could say where she worked. But the agency has many people—and not just spies—who protect their identity, not only to allow them to move more freely in various assignments but also for their own safety.
Indeed, while she and I were dating, the U.S. and its allies launched the first Gulf War in the winter of 1990–91. She worked at Langley with a CIA clearance, and I was on the personal staff of a senator with a top-secret Defense Department clearance. She knew a lot about what foreign countries were doing. I knew a lot about our military movements and the state of the enemy’s forces. We did not discuss classified information with each other even in the privacy of our own homes. We would laugh over dinner because we both had things we wanted to share but couldn’t. We had sworn not to discuss classified information outside a secure environment with people who did not have the appropriate institutional clearances—so, like the two adults we were, we just didn’t. That’s common across the classified world, then and now.
Now, let’s get to those Hegseth texts. The administration apparently thinks that “war plans” and “attack plans” are different, and as a general observation, they are. But that’s because detailed attack plans are vastly more dangerous than almost any other plans if they’re released. “War plans,” a term that doesn’t really have a particular meaning in the world of military documents, presumably refers to some scenario for a hypothetical future conflict, but if Hegseth’s position is that he didn’t release “war plans” and instead released only the details of the imminent movements of U.S. military forces, then he is not only reckless, he also doesn’t understand some basic concepts about defense planning, operations, and national security. Some of Hegseth’s defenders now claim that he’d likely declassified all of these details by the time they appeared in the chat. Declassification is within his power; if he chose to declassify the details before the operation was launched, however, then he is more incompetent than even his critics realize.
[Jeffrey Goldberg: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]
Think of it this way. Imagine your local police department is trying to deal with the threat from a local drug gang. “We have concerns about this gang” and “We will act to arrest these bad guys” would be unclassified. (Many police departments, by the way, do have intelligence units and produce restricted information.) “Our undercover officers have been watching this house” might be classified: You don’t want the bad guys knowing what you know or how you know it. (These are the “sources and methods” often referenced when talking about such information.) “We are going to execute a warrant at this hour, in this place, with this many people, armed with the following weapons” would be extremely classified. If that information is released early, the gang knows that the good guys are on the way—and might choose to ambush the cops.
Hegseth spilled the equivalent of those details just hours before the strike. Perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing, and he was almost certainly just showing off. But he put lives at risk by transferring information that is always classified at a high level to an unclassified system—the Signal app—one of the basic sins every government employee is warned never to commit when handling such materials. He then splattered that information across a chat to more than a dozen other people who had no need to know any of it. (“Need to know” is a very restrictive condition: Did Hegseth think anyone in that chat was going to pipe up at the last minute and say, “Wait a moment, Pete, maybe we should rethink sending the Tomahawks in after the second strike”?) In any case, “need to know” definitely does not include a reporter added to the chat by accident.
The president said yesterday that no classified information “as I understand it” was included in the chat, inviting some unsettling questions about what the president does and does not understand. (Trump today mentioned “a bad signal”; as CNN noted, he was “apparently conflating the name of the Signal app with an error in the communications.”)
For anyone who has a bit more competence in dealing with classified material, especially during wartime, seeing top defense and intelligence officials be so sloppy, and do things for which lesser mortals would be fired or even prosecuted, is vertigo-inducing. Watching them flail, make excuses, and try to evade responsibility is both nauseating and amusing. But realizing the risks these senior officials took with the lives of American military personnel is enraging—and should be to every sensible American, no matter their party or cause.
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