Governments leak, sometimes strategically, or more embarrassingly, at the hands of a disgruntled whistleblower. What we have here for the first time in recorded history is an accidental leak. A whoopsie of US national security where the most senior staff in US national security prefer to play with their own phones, ignoring the requirement from the Department of Defence and the CIA that all national security communications take place on secure networks.
The chief villain of the piece is said to be an unnamed staffer in the office of President Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. If you listen carefully you can hear the sound of the underling’s ritual arse-kicking as we speak. Waltz – of whom an anonymous White House insider offered the keen character assessment: “Everyone knows he’s a f —king idiot”, is said to have the support of the President for now.
Will Waltz be the first to go? Who knows in Trump World. Waltz might actually be promoted or he might just continue to lurk around the White House until he accidentally leaks video footage of the presidential colonoscopy to Mother Jones.
Eighteen senior national security staff used their private phones when summoned by Waltz.
It was a relative Who’s Who of the Trump administration including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defence Pete Hesgeth, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, director of the CIA John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and her deputy, Stephen Miller.
Editor-in-chief at the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, got a guernsey for reasons that are now being attributed to clumsy finger syndrome. Goldberg sat silently in the Houthi PC Small Group while the others wrangled with the pros and cons of a military strike in Yemen two hours before it began.
One analyst based in New York placed President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, in Moscow when he entered the group chat. Privet, Comrades. Just wait a moment or two so Vladimir Putin can log on. He was going to watch the bear baiting but this promises to be far more entertaining. Tulsi Gabbard also conceded she was overseas at the time. In gangster parlance, every single one of the 18 phones was ‘‘off’’.
The three separate chats, over several days with hours of dialogue, included another anti-European spray from Veep Vance, hinting at sending Europe the bill for the strike on the Houthis, either uninformed or untroubled by the fact the RAF had assisted US fighter jets with refuelling in air strike in question and had launched their own raids on Yemen in previous weeks.
Unbothered by tricky details, too, was Secretary Hegseth who reached for the caps lock for added emphasis in replying to Vance: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.” Show me on the dolls where the bad Europeans hurt you, guys.
Fifteen minutes earlier, Secretary Hegseth had suggested options were available. To bomb or not to bomb? That was the question.
And here Hegseth veered into the prophetic. “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus,” the former Fox News host typed. “Two immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both.”
Hegseth’s day got a lot worse when he let a few political cats out of the bag after his flight touched tarmac at Joint Base Pearl Harbour in Oahu.
As he greeted the gaggle of media it looked like Hegseth had reached for the pomade and could find only sump oil to manage his coiffed do before he deplaned. He showed the world the full array of his political tricks – deny everything and shoot the messenger.
“Nobody was texting war plans and that’s all I have to say about that,” Hegseth told reporters before launching a condemnation of his old group chat buddy, Goldberg, blissfully unaware that the White House had confirmed the Signal messages were genuine just minutes earlier.
Goldberg would later confirm that Hegseth had announced specific targets, attack sequencing, weapons and aircraft deployed two hours before parts of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, started exploding. Goldberg turned to X and right on time, reports from Yemen confirmed the attacks were underway.
It smacks of an episode of Get Smart where a goofy, prat-falling Agent 86 is played by Pete Hesgeth, where Hegseth dials into the chat on his shoe only to miss it by that much. Alas, here the parallel must end because Control had the Cone of Silence when it was handling heady matters of national security.
Did no one think to ask who JG was? Did America’s most senior national security personnel see JG and think oh, I see Julia Gillard’s popped in for a quick briefing? Has Johannes Gutenberg gone digital?
The larger question now is whether this is, as the POTUS has suggested, a learning moment for the group chat crew or will it usher in a golden age of governmental stupidity where each act of wanton idiocy is dumber than the last?
Anything’s possible and right now, Gabbard and Ratcliffe are busying themselves throwing Hegseth under the bus.
When unable to explain the inexplicable, they gleefully heaped all the blame on Hegseth.
Not much contemplated by the media so far is the elephant in the group chat, or rather the absence of the elephantine frame of Trump, who when asked about his chatty subordinates, happily conceded that he knew nothing about their Signal shenanigans.
This leaves the perplexing thought that the bombing raids on Yemen were on a need to know basis and it seems the group chat thought the President did not need to know.
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