The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
By now you may have heard that President Trump’s most senior officials discussed war plans on Signal, and that the group chat actually included Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Goldberg published his findings, and it caused an explosion in Washington with many Democrats calling for an investigation, and even the occasional Republican slamming this as an unacceptable security breach. President Trump was asked about this, and shockingly he claimed not to know anything about it. What struck us though is what Trump didn’t say. He failed to say that he’s going to get to the bottom of this mess, and that it should have never happened. Today, we’re trying to dig through all this with the perfect guest, veteran national security lawyer Bradley Moss. Brad, thanks for coming on, man.
Bradley Moss: Absolutely, any time.
Sargent: National security adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and some others were talking on Signal about their upcoming plans to bomb Yemen’s Houthis to open up shipping in the Red Sea. Somehow, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got included. The top officials argued a bit about the plans, and then soon after Hegseth openly shares operational details about the move itself, about the operation itself. Can you lay out what happened here, Brad?
Moss: This is the movie Idiocracy come to life. This is just completely reckless. So, to be clear, what we know so far is that on the commercially available Signal encrypted chat platform, which everybody and anybody in D.C. uses, these various senior officials were discussing a number of things regarding the upcoming attacks they were gonna launch against the Houthis. And what originally looked like a set of policy discussions quickly devolved into extensive details about how these attacks would take place, by what units, what locations, what the government knew about foreign entities. It demonstrated nothing less than complete disregard for the very nature of secure communications.
These are officials who are trusted with some of the most sensitive secrets the U.S. government has, who serve in some of the most sensitive positions within the U.S. government with all kinds of authority and leverage and discretion, and they are acting like 14-year-old children on this chat, thumping their chest and sending emojis back and forth the way my teenage daughter does.
Sargent: Well, Brad, I want to ask you: It’s common enough, as you said, for top officials to communicate via Signal about certain things, but is it typical for the country’s top national security officials to talk this way on Signal about extremely sensitive military operations as well as the complicated considerations that go into them? The Signal app isn’t an approved channel for such communications, is it? How serious a breach is this?
Moss: This could be a very significant breach if for no other reason than that it’s a commercial platform. It’s not controlled by the U.S. government. Other foreign governments almost certainly have tried to breach it and steal information from it. It is absolutely not authorized for any type of classified discussion.
There’s two legal concerns that a lot of us have right now. There is the more benign and more simplistic one from an archival standpoint, which is these are all senior officials who are all subject to the Federal Records Act and, to a lesser extent, the Presidential Records Act, who have to document everything that happens for historical purposes, for the government archives and documents, for future historians, for accountability, for oversight purposes. So that’s one issue. That’s the civil archival issue.
The separate one, the more concerning one is potential criminal liability. These discussions—we don’t know the full extent of what was in these texts because even Jeffrey Goldberg, who is under no obligation to redact classified information, withheld those details because it concerned him as an American to think of that type of detail being put out in the public venue. If those details are in fact classified, if we assume for the sake of argument that Goldberg didn’t totally misinterpret it, it is a significant and serious breach of classified protocols, of criminal law, and it exposed all this information to being stolen by other entities.
And it raises questions. This is just the one chat we know about. What other chats are there? What other threads are there that the director of national intelligence, the attorney general are on, where they’re discussing plans to deport alleged members of Tren de Aragua? What other types of sensitive U.S. government details are on Signal, and what, if anything, is being done to ensure these officials keep that in approved classified channels?
Sargent: That brings me to the next point here: what Donald Trump had to say about this. He was asked about it, and here’s what happened.
Reporter (audio voiceover): Your reaction to the story from The Atlantic that said that some of your top cabinet officials and aides had been discussing very sensitive material through Signal and they included in an Atlantic reporter for that? What is your response to that?
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?
Reporter (audio voiceover): They were using Signal to coordinate on sensitive materials—
Trump (audio voiceover): Having to do with what? Having to do with what? What were they talking about?
Reporter (audio voiceover): —with the Houthis.
Trump (audio voiceover): The Houthis, you mean the attacker, the Houthis?
Reporter (audio voiceover): That’s correct.
Trump (audio voiceover): Well, it couldn’t have been very effective because the attack was very effective, I can tell you that. I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time.
Sargent: Brad, note that Trump’s immediate instinct is to be angry at The Atlantic for reporting this, not to wonder whether it’s actually true or why it happened, or to say that he’s going to get to the bottom of it and fix any problems that led to this mess. Everything is always about whether something is embarrassing to him. This is not what he should be focused on. It’s not ideal to have a megalomaniac like this in charge in such situations. What do you make of that, Brad?
Moss: Yeah, you have to feel bad for poor Donald Trump. He is the last person in this government to ever know anything. It’s always the I know nothing about it, I didn’t hear anything about it, you’re all fake news, you’re the enemy of the people response. And that’s what you saw here. Just as you noted, his initial concern wasn’t, This is really concerning to me as the commander in chief and the ultimate classification authority. I’m going to personally look into this to make sure that my appointees, my cabinet officials are complying with the law. And if they’re not, I will take action because I am the ultimate decider of national security protocols. No. All he knew to do was to attack The Atlantic and say, I know nothing else, because that’s who Donald Trump is. Accountability, laws, procedures—those only apply to other people. They don’t ever apply to Donald Trump.
Sargent: Exactly right. We should note that a spokesperson for the administration actually confirmed that the exchange was real, so we know it happened. We know this happened and Donald Trump refused to address something that had actually been confirmed.
Moss: And I’m sure Donald Trump had no idea that statement had gone out. I’m sure Donald Trump knew nothing about the story. He was probably busy jumping between hitting the Coke button on his desk, chatting up some business deal from people at Mar-a-Lago, and discussing his next tee time. That’s the entirety of what his presidency is. He is the puppet head. He sits there to ramble to the press, to show off his signature, and then to go play golf. He has no insight into what truly happens in this government. And he’s left it to what I would politely describe as a bunch of unserious gaslighting trolls. Not qualified professionals but people whose entire ethos is premised on political gaslighting, from the attorney general to the director of national intelligence to the secretary of defense—all of them. Their entire background is political, not necessarily this area of expertise and professionalism.
Sargent: Let’s go back to what you brought up earlier, which is the legality of this. It seems like it’s cause for serious investigation. It looks as if Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, coordinated this communication, so it’s possible some laws were violated, right? Can you walk us through that?
Moss: Sure. This would almost certainly violate the Espionage Act in that they were placing classified information or, more broadly, national defense information into an unauthorized location, namely the Signal chat, which is not authorized to contain classified discussions. They were disseminating it to other individuals. It’s questionable whether or not everybody in that chat had the requisite need to know; but putting that aside, they’re disseminating it to Jeffrey Goldberg. For whatever reason that these various individuals put him on, that is in and of itself a violation of the Espionage Act and a couple different statutory provisions that don’t even require willful intent but simply have to do with you gave it to an unauthorized third party.
In any other world, in any other time in D.C. politics and governance, this would be a cause for immediate congressional investigations. It would be cause for immediate internal inquiries to determine why this was allowed to happen, to what extent this is a larger problem, and to what extent people involved on these chats cross the line into civil or criminal liability. In the world of Donald Trump and his presidency, it is unlikely that any of that will happen unless and until the Democratic Party finds a way to gather itself together and win the midterms to at least have some oversight authority. I have no reason to believe that’ll happen for the next two years though.
Sargent: I want to ask you about that in a second. I just want to pin down one point, though: Even if you remove the accidental admission of Jeffrey Goldberg to this chat, putting aside the Goldberg leak, there’s still potential criminal liability simply by virtue of them having this group discussion on Signal, right?
Moss: Correct. The actions that Pete Hegseth, Michael Waltz, and all these individuals took of putting this level of clear national defense information on a commercial platform—doing it knowingly, putting what [they] absolutely knew was national defense information there—would almost certainly be considered a violation of the Espionage Act. Will it be prosecuted, even in a perfect world? Unlikely, if for no other reason than Donald Trump has no political interest in throwing these people under the bus. But from a strictly legal standpoint, this was the violation of security procedures, of the trust that’s afforded those with a clearance, and of the simple basic precepts of criminal exposure for national defense information that everyone who works in this field is told to respect.
Sargent: Brad, you pinpointed a key point there, which is that in a world where the people in charge have absolutely zero interest in accountability of any kind, this type of thing becomes more problematic. And I think that is why we should be looking at what Trump said about this and really balking a whole lot and getting alarmed. He clearly doesn’t want accountability for anything that could potentially make him look bad. That’s always the organizing principle for him. And this brings us to Congress as well. You mentioned that there would be a potential role for serious congressional investigations, but as far as I can tell, almost no Republican has said anything. I think Congressman Don Bacon did say communicating via these channels was a huge mistake. It seems like there’s a situation where having an entire political party whose whole project is to protect Trump at all costs is really not ideal, is it?
Moss: This is the concern that so many of us had in terms of this current formulation of the Republican Party. It’s not about anything in particular regarding political principles. It’s not about a particular vision for governance. It’s about kneeling before Donald Trump. Whatever he says on a particular given day is now the position in his government, they’ll fall in line with it. It doesn’t matter if it violates every other provision and every other principle they’ve ever upheld. So I have no reason right now, as you noted, to think that any of these Republican chairmen or members of Republican leadership in the House or the Senate are going to authorize some wide-ranging investigation. There would have to be immense political pressure from within, which I just don’t anticipate seeing.
But it’s going to bubble up, and it’s going to be one of many pieces of evidence of how unserious this administration is and how they’re jeopardizing not only national security but also your safety and your paycheck by doing all these other things with Elon Musk. That will be almost certainly part of the Democratic messaging in the midterms. Whether or not Democrats can effectively do that is a whole different discussion that we can write books about, but this is going to be part and parcel of the next two years of political messaging.
Sargent: Brad, it seems to me that one thing this will also do is really wet the appetites of journalists. They’re going to really start pushing very hard to look at more such situations that could be developing. There’s going to be a tendency to give the administration even less of the benefit of the doubt when they offer their defenses of breaches like these. Where do you see this going? What can you envision happening in terms of future breaches given what we’re talking about here, which is a world with zero accountability?
Moss: One could only hope, standing from outside the journalistic world and the fourth estate, that this reinforces the spine and the backbone of a lot of members and elements of corporate traditional media, who have spent the last two or three months cowering before Donald Trump. They’re intimidated at this point. He’s exerting all kinds of leverage against their shareholders and their corporate bosses. So even if it was unwittingly, they’ve taken a mild hands-off approach at the moment out of fear.
This is yet another crack in Trump’s armor. He can be scrutinized. He can be held accountable, even if only through just public news gathering and dissemination of information. This is what the fourth estate is supposed to do, regardless of Republican or Democrat. This is a clear, obvious angle to pursue to get into how reckless this administration has been, and you would hope that journalists will do so.
Sargent: To wrap this up, looked at this way, you could even see his weird rambling and defensive response as a display of weakness. If he’s not able to grab these situations in hand and act like a real leader, which he isn’t, I think he’s actually showing a pretty major vulnerability there. What do you think?
Moss: Yeah. It’ll call into question not only his competence but also his ability to avoid the curse of Biden, who people took less and less seriously over the course of the four years when it didn’t look like he could really handle the difficult questions, that he was cognizant of the full extent of what was going on. That’s got to be Trump’s biggest fear, because he’s only got about 18 months until he becomes irrelevant. The moment the midterms are done and everybody starts angling for the presidential run in 2028, he becomes an irrelevant lame duck—and it’s going to drive him nuts.
He is either going to pull himself together at this point, or he’s going to watch these types of stories chip away at his political armor, chip away at the ethos, the myth of Donald Trump as an invincible political titan who’s taken down all these political families. It will drive him crazier and crazier to not be able to control what is going on, and to be viewed and seen as simply an ineffectual puppet.
Sargent: One hundred percent. I would even add that Donald Trump knows as well as anybody that he has no effing business standing up there. And that’s why he lashes out whenever the emperor’s clothes are ripped off so violently.
Moss: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s always been his concern: that he’d be exposed.
Sargent: Brad Moss, thanks so much for talking to us, man. Really good conversation.
Moss: Not a problem. Talk soon.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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