Seven Ways of Looking at a Group Chat

We don’t do hot takes at The Dispatch, but here’s one that’s warm and trending toward a simmer. As I read through The Big Scoop yesterday, I kept thinking, “I hope no one’s getting fired for this.”

The Big Scoop is Jeffrey Goldberg’s account in The Atlantic of a group chat he found himself in earlier this month on the encrypted messaging app Signal. On March 11, he says, he received an invitation to join the chat from a user named “Michael Waltz,” which happens to be the name of Donald Trump’s national security adviser. In the days that followed, other accounts with names matching the names or initials of Trump Cabinet officials—including J.D. Vance—entered the chat.

Goldberg first assumed he was being pranked, but as the discussion developed, he began to believe that he had been inadvertently included in an actual virtual conversation among top national security officials on whether to strike Houthi positions in Yemen. On the morning of March 15, an account named “Pete Hegseth” allegedly notified the group that attacks would begin at 1:45 p.m. ET and laid out “operational details … including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

News reports of explosions in Yemen began trickling in by 1:55 p.m. At that point, says Goldberg, he could only conclude that the discussion to which he’d been privy was a bona fide confab of Trump’s inner circle and promptly removed himself from the chat.

“I hope no one’s getting fired for this,” I thought.

The reason I don’t want anyone fired is because of a lesson we all learned about the president’s personnel decisions from his first term: Whoever comes next will be worse. If Donald Trump feels moved to defenestrate Waltz or Hegseth, his choice of successor won’t be some steady, low-key natsec expert in the Robert Gates mold. It’ll be Mike Flynn. Or Roger Stone. Or Alina Habba.

Actually, never mind that last one. Habba’s preoccupied with her preposterous new job as the (interim) top federal prosecutor in New Jersey.

There are many things to say today about The Big Scoop. Seven, to be precise.

1. The fall guy.

There are three distinct scandals here and different culprits in each one.

The first is using Signal instead of secure government channels to discuss something as sensitive as military strikes. Everyone involved, save Jeffrey Goldberg, bears responsibility for that. The second is mistakenly including Goldberg in the discussion, for which Waltz would seem to be at fault. And the third is going so far as to share “operational details” in the chat, potentially placing people in the field at risk, which sure sounds like reckless mishandling of classified information—a subject on which Republicans have had a lot to say in recent years. The blame for that would appear to land on Hegseth.

Hegseth’s breach is the most severe, but it’s Waltz who’s most likely to end up as the fall guy. (“Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a f—ing idiot,” one disgruntled aide told Politico.) And not just because it’s easier to replace a national security adviser, who’s not subject to Senate confirmation, than a defense secretary, who is.

It comes down to politics. Trump’s “America First” advisers reportedly don’t trust Waltz or Marco Rubio, suspecting that they still secretly harbor Reaganite sympathies for the western liberal order and animosity toward Russia. Groupchat-gate is populists’ excuse to rid themselves of Waltz and they’re trying to take advantage.

Trump and MAGA activists also expended loads of political capital to get Hegseth confirmed and won’t want to see their investment wasted so soon by ousting him. In fact, the more politically wounded Hegseth is, the more valuable to them he becomes. He’s expected to be the consummate yes-man on the job, willing to carry out any order Trump gives him without the moral qualms experienced by the likes of Mark Esper and Mark Milley. He owes the president for sticking by him during a tough confirmation fight and he’ll owe him more after Trump sticks by him in this mess too.

He’ll never say no to him now.

2. Total impunity.

I doubt that any administration would have gone as far as to prosecute its own Cabinet for the lawbreaking that may have occurred here, which potentially includes violating the Presidential Records Act and misconduct involving classified information. But firings? Sure, those would be on the table.

Trump won’t fire anyone, though, I suspect—not even Waltz. (He sounded disinclined to do so as of Tuesday morning.) He’d hate to give Jeffrey Goldberg, whom he despises, the satisfaction of scalping his national security adviser. And he’s forever loath to admit that he made a mistake, which is what dumping Waltz after just two months on the job would amount to.

Besides, doing so would contradict the ethos of his second term, which is that the president’s cronies are entitled to operate without accountability. That’s why the usual criticism of intelligence scandals, that there’s one standard for “elite” leakers and another for the rank-and-file, doesn’t bite as hard this time: The whole point of caudillo politics is that the law doesn’t apply to the leader’s friends. Yes, Trump taunted Joe Biden at their debate for refusing to fire incompetent deputies, and yes, he and his Cabinet have vowed to crack down on leaks. That hypocrisy doesn’t matter. What matters is who’s a friend and who’s an enemy.

Mike Flynn was already gone as national security adviser by this point in Trump’s first term, when the new president was still operating according to traditional political rules in Washington. Eight years later, the rules are different: Never again will Donald Trump be shamed into punishing a loyal henchman. Go figure, then, that when Axios asked nine different administration advisers whether they thought Waltz would stay on, only one sounded unsure. “We don’t care what the media says,” another said. “We can easily handle what would kill any other administration. This will blow over.”

The president and his team are proud of their shamelessness. It’s the source of their political strength. It’ll probably be Mike Waltz’s salvation.

3. A surprising confession.

Almost as shocking as The Big Scoop itself is the fact that one of Trump’s deputies confirmed Goldberg’s suspicions about the Signal group chat. “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told The Atlantic.

It’s weird to me that Hughes didn’t launch instantly into a dreary wheeze about “fake news.” Since when do these people ever confess to wrongdoing, especially after an incident as embarrassing as this one?

Standard protocol for the president and his minions when doing damage control is DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. That’s the playbook Hegseth used on Monday (see for yourself) when reporters confronted him about Goldberg’s story, and no wonder. He learned during his confirmation ordeal that the trick to getting Trump and Trumpists firmly on your side is to start throwing roundhouses at their enemies, irrespective of the facts.

Hegseth sensed that the best way to shore up his political support was to turn this story into a test of credibility between himself and The Atlantic. It was a shrewd play and might have worked—if Hughes hadn’t already admitted that the Signal chat was real.

4. Chaotic damage control.

Maybe Hughes was simply caught off-guard by the magnitude of the security breach and was uncertain about what Goldberg had. A “fake news” lie might have made things worse if The Atlantic began producing hard evidence to support the story’s claims.

Right-wing propagandists were caught in the same trap. All day long on Monday, the populist chatterati struggled to land on a consensus view of why the group chat was Actually Good. Coverage on Fox News ranged from DARVO to yawning at the scandal (“We’ve All Texted The Wrong Person Before”) to celebrating the chat as evidence of how smart and collaborative Trump’s team is. Some online influencers postulated that Goldberg had been included in the chat deliberately, a bit of eight-dimensional chess by Waltz et al. to leak the contents for strategic reasons.

Yesterday I listed four factors to consider when asking whether Americans will feel outraged by a political scandal. Is it easy to understand? Is it so shocking that it can’t be ignored by partisan media? Does it contradict expectations for the officials caught in the scandal? Will “the bad guys” benefit if the public gets angry about it?

The Big Scoop checks each of the first three boxes. It’s perfectly straightforward. It’s a stunning security breach and a comic freak show, resembling a Keystone Kops caper in how Goldberg got involved. And it confounds public expectations that Trump’s national security team would restore a degree of (giggle) competence to the White House after the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle of Joe Biden’s presidency.

That’s a formidable scandal for right-wing media to cope with, and that’s why their damage control operation stumbled out of the gate.

5. “War plans.”

The one box of the four that isn’t checked is the one about the “bad guys.” Jeffrey Goldberg and the liberal media to which he belongs are archvillains to Trump supporters, which likely explains why Republican spin on Tuesday began to steer around toward calling him a liar.

The supposed lie has to do with the most sensational claim in the story. Did Pete Hegseth really post “war plans” in the Signal chat or did The Atlantic exaggerate that in order to make its bombshell story that much more explosive and damning?

Goldberg didn’t describe the “operational details” that Hegseth shared because, he says, they “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel.” Depending on whom you believe, that was either prudent and patriotic or it was Goldberg’s way of accusing the defense secretary of a grievous security breach while providing himself with a convenient excuse for not substantiating the charge.

Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, sharpened the dispute in a statement on Tuesday. “No ‘war plans’ were discussed,” she asserted. “No classified material was sent to the thread.” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, made the same claim during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

So we have a test of credibility after all. Whom should we trust? The reporter whose account of Trump’s Cabinet chatting on Signal about bombing the Houthis has already been confirmed by the National Security Council’s spokesman? Or an administration of brazen liars who have every reason to lie about what Hegseth shared, and who would be attacking Goldberg viciously today if he had shared “operational details” in his story?

We don’t need to trust either, actually.

As our own Steve Hayes noted, if it’s true that nothing classified was posted in the Signal chat, the White House should have no problem with releasing a transcript of what was said. Or, if no transcript exists because Signal automatically deleted it—a big legal problem in its own right!—Trump could simply order the chat declassified, allowing Goldberg to publish the screenshots he has. Or Republicans in Congress could request the material from Goldberg and do their farking jobs by investigating what happened and resolving the dispute.

Whichever avenue to the truth the president and his party choose to take, it’s their responsibility at this point to show that Goldberg is lying rather than Goldberg’s responsibility to prove his claim about “operational details.” The burden of proof shifted when Hughes confirmed the authenticity of the chat; if The Atlantic and allllll of the lawyers who surely reviewed The Big Scoop before publication are exaggerating about “war plans” being shared, it should be easy enough for Trump and Republicans to expose it.

If they seem reluctant to do so, which would be wildly out of character for them after supposedly being impugned by the fake-news media, ask yourself why.

6. Total insecurity.

You’ll recall that my first thought while reading Goldberg’s story and reflecting on the president’s personnel choices was “I hope no one’s getting fired for this.” My second was “The Russians and Chinese had all of this information already, no?”

Trump’s second administration will be an orgy of foreign espionage. It’s staffed to the gills with lackwit toadies, sociopathic grifters, and authoritarian ideologues and so, for the next four years, U.S. intelligence will be profligately stolen, sold, or incompetently fumbled away. And that’s just the illegal stuff. The legal stuff is also dismaying: Elon Musk’s operation is seizing treasure troves of federal data, federal cybersecurity experts are being fired willy-nilly, the Justice Department has disbanded its Foreign Influence Task Force, and the president and some of his most trusted deputies keep sounding like Russian agents. 

The proverbial palace is being looted, and not for the first time. In the midst of an ongoing heist, it seems churlish to be angry at Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth for incompetence.

Then again, the incompetence in this case was extraordinary. Twice in the past five weeks alone, Signal users were warned about security risks. Our best and brightest chose to use the app anyway to talk shop about impending military strikes, raising a question of how often they’re using it to collaborate on matters of high secrecy. And if Goldberg’s claim about “war plans” being posted is true, it raises a logistical question of how Hegseth got those plans onto the app. If he didn’t type them out, is he … carrying them around on his phone? Is that phone secure?

A country that can’t be trusted with intelligence won’t be. Our allies had already begun to doubt whether they should share information with an administration led by Russia apologists, but discovering that our national security team bumbled its way into including a reporter in their military planning sessions might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. If nothing else, the hostility J.D. Vance expressed toward Europe in the group chat might help Europeans further digest the bitter reality that America really isn’t an “ally” anymore and that they should act accordingly.

Greater suspicion among western nations of each other’s motives will mean greater insecurity for all.

7. Invite clowns, expect a circus.

“It was reckless not to check who was on the thread. It was reckless to be having that conversation on Signal. You can’t have recklessness as the national security adviser,” a Trump official told Politico, heaping blame on Waltz for the mess.

All of that is true, but let’s be real. This is a failure with many fathers.

If you elect a criminal who values loyalty above competence; if you confirm an unqualified nominee to lead the military because you’re too cowardly to oppose him; if you incentivize ruthlessness in your leaders by refusing to hold them accountable for failures, you’re handing public policy over to clowns.

And policy run by clowns is destined to become a circus.

The most interesting thing about the behavior here of Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth is that they’re both smart, capable men. Waltz was a colonel in the special forces; Hegseth is an Ivy League grad who served honorably in the military. Removed from the circus culture in which they now operate, I suspect both would recognize instantly how reckless it is to conduct sensitive national security business in an insecure forum.

In fact, I don’t suspect it, I know it.

This failure isn’t a matter of stupidity, in other words, it’s a matter of corruption. Waltz and Hegseth knew that Trump wouldn’t care how securely or insecurely they behaved (I mean, really) and in a pseudo-autocratic operation like this one that’s the only relevant political consideration. Obviously, they would have thought differently if they knew Jeffrey Goldberg would end up on the thread, but that’s a question of getting caught, not a question of behaving responsibly. They assumed they had the president’s approval; that’s all that mattered.

That logic will bite us in worse ways than this before this presidency is done.