‘They screwed up’: Intel community aghast at Trump team’s security breach
Washington: “Under the previous administration, we looked like fools,” US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said seven days ago during an Oval Office press conference with Donald Trump. “Not any more.”
But a week is a long time in politics, and now Hegseth is accused of embarrassing the Trump administration by posting highly sensitive, if not outright classified, military operation details to a high-level government group chat that – unbeknownst to him, it seems – included a senior American journalist.
White House national security adviser Mike Waltz, left, added the journalist to the group chat. US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth (right) divulged highly sensitive military details.Credit: AP
Signal-gate, so named for the encrypted consumer messaging app on which the chat took place, has stunned America, galvanised listless Democrats and even aggravated Republicans, though they are still careful in their critiques.
On Thursday (Washington time), the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, along with the top Democrat, formally asked the Defence Department’s inspector general to conduct an inquiry into the affair.
The inquiry would examine exactly how The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg – no friend of Trump’s – was added to the group with the vice-president, defence secretary, secretary of state and a dozen other senior officials. It would also look into the information shared in the group, whether it was classified, and whether the phone app Signal was a legal or appropriate communication platform for such content.
For US allies – who surely recall Trump sharing intelligence with Russians in 2017, and his cavalier attitude to classified documents lying around his Mar-a-Lago home – the scandal is another reminder that his administration cares little for established norms and protocols.
Texts between Vice President J.D. Vance, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff posted to the group.
Australia, as a Five Eyes intelligence sharing partner of the US – along with the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada – has particular reason to sit up and pay attention. Every security expert interviewed for this story said the saga would raise eyebrows in defence and intelligence circles, if not prompt action.
“It’s a disaster for the US administration,” says retired Australian Army major general Mick Ryan. “It makes them look foolish and incompetent in many respects. This is a group of amateurs who can’t even get the basics of operational security right.”
“It also causes a fairly interesting dilemma for those allies of the US who share sensitive intelligence with them. Will it also end up in Signal chat that we all know is quite open to compromise by any quasi-sophisticated intelligence agency of a foreign nation?”
Ryan, who is also a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute, says there’s no point in the Australian government publicly raising concerns. But there may be “quiet, private conversations” occurring between the heads of intelligence agencies.
Democrats held up copies of Pete Hegseth’s messages detailing times, strikes and weapons to the Signal group at a committee hearing.Credit: AP
“A lot of intelligence agencies will be doing a very quiet assessment of exactly what information is copied to different parts of the US system to ensure that sensitive national data isn’t compromised,” Ryan says.
Chris Taylor, head of the statecraft and intelligence program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says Signal-gate adds to a pile of bigger changes happening in US governance, policy and intelligence.
“I do think it would be natural for the Australian government, for the intel community, to seek reassurances about the way Australian information is being handled,” he says. “You would expect if it was reversed that the Americans would be asking us the same thing.”
Indeed, it was British and American concerns about Australian security leaks that led to the creation of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, ASIO, in 1949.
“British intelligence and American intelligence went to [then prime minister] Ben Chifley and said: we’re not confident you are handling the information we are giving you with the seriousness that’s required,” William Stoltz, a security expert at the Australian National University, explains.
“We took that on board and we adjusted our processes accordingly. This is a similar moment when Five Eyes chiefs should be going to their American counterparts and saying: we expect you to do the same thing.”
‘It gets sucked in?’
As Australia’s federal election campaign gets under way and the Trump administration keeps up its tariff assault, the Albanese government isn’t interested in rocking the boat.
“It obviously isn’t desirable, and I’m sure they regard that the same,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas. “Mistakes happen from time to time. The important thing is, when something like that happens, that you identify how it happened and put in place measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The US takes security seriously, and I’m sure they will respond appropriately.”
Vice President J.D. Vance was part of the high-level group chat on Signal.Credit: Nine
But the Trump administration’s response has become as much a part of the scandal as the group chat itself. In line with their usual playbook – deny, deflect, denigrate – the White House, the president and his cabinet have downplayed the significance of the breach, dismissed the story as a “hoax”, and derided Goldberg as a liar, a partisan Democrat and – in Trump’s words – “a total sleazebag”.
They attempted to draw a distinction between “war plans” – which was how The Atlantic initially described the material in a headline – and dot points about imminent strikes, accusing the magazine of overreach. Moreover, they said the operation to strike Houthi targets in Yemen was a success, and that was “the real story”.
The Atlantic stands by its reporting. And the administration’s excuses and explanations have been chaotic, contradictory and unconvincing – as was the account given by national security adviser Michael Waltz, who admitted he was the one who added Goldberg to the group.
Waltz tried to suggest Goldberg had somehow hacked or scammed his way into Waltz’s phone under an alias, prompting this exchange with Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
Waltz: “I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where it said one person and then a different phone number.”
Ingraham: “But you’ve never talked to him before, so how is the number on your phone?”
Waltz: “Well, if you have somebody else’s contact and then somehow it gets sucked in … it gets sucked in.”
Signal is a secure but consumer grade chat app for personal devices.Credit: AP
America’s late-night TV hosts had a field day. “It gets sucked in?” Stephen Colbert gasped to howls of audience laughter on CBS. “It gets sucked in. Okay. So, you’re discussing military secrets on an app that’s so insecure that the numbers of people you’ve never spoken to just get sucked in.”
Colbert’s point gets to the bigger picture of the scandal. Aside from the epic blunder of accidentally adding a journalist to the chat (every journalist’s dream), why were these highly sensitive, if not classified, discussions happening on Signal to begin with?
Signal is the preferred encrypted messaging platform in government and media circles, with an excellent reputation for security. But it is still an open-source consumer app, not a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) used by the US government and military for secure communications.
“Signal is a very good app, but the reality is the apps are only ever as secure as the device that they’re on,” says Stoltz. “These people’s personal devices would probably be some of the most targeted pieces of electronics in the world. People in that world, at that level, should be exercising a high degree of discretion and prudence. Some of these things really shouldn’t be put down in writing, let alone on a personal device.”
Trump has mostly brushed the scandal aside, calling it a “witch hunt” and seeming visibly bored by the matter. He also appeared to be confused about, or unaware of, elements of what happened.
Democrats have turned their focus on Hegseth for posting the details of the imminent operation to the group chat, saying it endangered military lives and he must resign. Those messages – which The Atlantic published after the administration insisted they weren’t classified – showed Hegseth included the times of the planned attacks and the weapons that would be used.
“My job … is to provide general updates in real time, to keep everybody informed. That’s what I did,” Hegseth said. “Nobody was texting war plans.”
Hegseth is a weak link in the chain: a former Fox weekend host, he was arguably Trump’s most contentious cabinet appointee, and was the only one to require a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance.
Some political opponents even publicly questioned whether Hegseth was drunk when he posted. He vowed to stop drinking alcohol upon his confirmation as defence secretary, having denied multiple accusations of bad misbehaviour while intoxicated, as well as sexual misconduct allegations. There is no evidence he consumed alcohol, and he was not the one who added Goldberg to the chat.
Heading to court
Like so many things under the Trump administration, the matter is now heading to court. American Oversight, a non-profit watchdog and lobby group on transparency, filed a lawsuit claiming the use of Signal violated federal laws on preserving government records.
The case has ended up before the same federal judge in Washington who is presiding over the high-profile legal challenge to Trump’s attempt to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged gang members without the protections of immigration law.
Trump was apoplectic. “How disgraceful is it that ‘Judge’ James Boasberg has just been given a fourth ‘Trump Case’, something which is, statistically, IMPOSSIBLE,” he posted on Truth Social at 1.13am on Thursday.
“[Boasberg] seems to be grabbing the ‘Trump Cases’ all to himself, even though it is not supposed to happen that way … There must be an immediate investigation of this Rigged System, before it is too late!”
At a hearing on Friday (AEDT), Boasberg ordered administration officials to preserve messages from the Signal group chat.
Meanwhile, many Republicans and party strategists are urging the White House and the officials involved to admit fault and move on. Mike Rounds, a Republican senator from South Dakota who sits on both the Armed Services Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence, backed the establishment of an inquiry and said Signal should never have been used in this way.
“They really should not have done that,” he told CNN. “I think they screwed up. I think they know they screwed up. I think they learned their lesson.”
Mick Ryan, the retired Australian major general, was far more scathing. “This clearly had the potential to put the lives of military personnel at risk, and that is, at heart, the most appalling thing that any senior national security leader can do,” he said.
“There are absolutely no shades of grey here. If that had been senior military people discussing exactly the same thing, I expect they would have been sacked almost instantaneously.
“It is such a gross and cavalier approach to keeping information secure that there’s only one real thing you could do, and that is remove those people.”
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