The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 26 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.
We’re now in day two of the fallout from the stunning news that President Trump’s most senior national security officials allowed a journalist onto a highly sensitive discussion of war plans. Fox News figures are out in force denying wildly that anything at all is amiss. Yet under questioning from Senate Democrats, numerous Trump administration figures all but admitted that something very deeply amiss really had happened, wrecking the pro-Trump spin. For instance, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was pressed on whether the information was classified, she passed the buck to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Gabbard evaded wildly on other fronts as well, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe made some striking admissions too. We’re going to try to unravel all of this today with Rosa Brooks, an expert in national security law who held a senior policy adviser role at the Pentagon during the Obama presidency. Rosa, thank you so much for coming on.
Rosa Brooks: My pleasure, Greg.
Sargent: The Trump administration is now under heavy fire over the news that The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was included on the chat between Defense Secretary Hegseth, DNI Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director Ratcliffe, and many others. They were talking on Signal about their upcoming plans to bomb Yemen’s Houthis and shared a number of sensitive operational details. Rosa, before we dive into the specifics, what’s your general sense of where the story is right now? It seems to have caught fire in a new way. It’s not dying down. Your reading?
Brooks: This is a stunning, stunning story. And I think the rest of us are all just feeling hurt that Mike Waltz didn’t add us to the Signal chat. I know Mike Waltz, and I’m going to write him a note saying, Next time you disclose classified information, I’d really like to be in the loop too. It’s stunning because (1) they accidentally included a journalist in a discussion of targeting war plans, (2) they were having this discussion on Signal, a commercial app, and not on existing secure U.S. government channels, which they’re supposed to be using if they’re discussing classified information, and (3) imminent plans to bomb a target are, of course, classified. How could they not be, unless the president just announced we’re going to start bombing tonight? Of course, they’re classified. But if they’re so convinced that nothing is classified, they can demonstrate that by telling Jeff Goldberg to go ahead and release the transcript of the entire chat, which he saved because he is a journalist. And unlike them, he apparently believes in record retention, which the government officials are supposed to believe in.
This is so criminally careless on every level. That leads me to number four. This, of course, is what the Republicans were beating up Hillary Clinton about—a much lesser lapse—for years: about her emails, her use of a private email server. As far as I know, Hillary Clinton was not actually discussing classified war plans. My vocabulary is failing me [in terms of] the number of ways to say that this was criminally irresponsible, probably illegal, and in any normal universe, would have led to immediate resignations across the executive branch.
Sargent: Well, to one of your points, I want to play some audio from the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, grilled Gabbard hard, asking pointedly if the information was classified. She says it wasn’t. Then this happened.
Angus King (audio voiceover): What if that had been made public that morning before the attack took place?
Tulsi Gabbard (audio voiceover): Senator, I can attest to the fact that there were no classified or intelligence equities that were included in that chat group at any time. And I defer …
King (audio voiceover): The attack sequencing and timing and weapons and targets you don’t consider should have been classified, or were classified?
Gabbard (audio voiceover): I defer to the secretary of defense, the National Security Council on that question.
King (audio voiceover): Well, you’re the head of…You’re the head of the intelligence community. You’re supposed to know about classifications. So your testimony very clearly today is that nothing was in that set of texts that were classified. I’ll follow up on Senator Wyden’s question. If that’s the case, please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion.
Sargent: Rosa, we know that operational details were in fact in the texts, as Goldberg has said. And in fact, Gabbard admits straight out under questioning from Senator Mark Kelly elsewhere that there was discussion of military targets in general. And Ratcliffe also admitted to that. Rosa, what do you make of those exchanges?
Brooks: It’s hard to take anything she’s saying seriously because of course she knows what was said in that Signal chat, and of course she can tell the difference. Or I would hope to God that as the director of national intelligence that she has a basic understanding of what kinds of information tends to be classified and what kind isn’t. And the notion that she would go, Oh gee whiz, well, I don’t know, I guess you’d have to ask the secretary of defense whether this is classified…. If she doesn’t know then she is not qualified for her job, and if she does know then she is part of an egregious security breach.
Sargent: I think there’s no question about it. She was clearly totally flummoxed and didn’t know what to say. I want to move to Fox News for a second. Fox’s top propagandists all have spun wildly about this. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters documented, Laura Ingraham blamed the prominence of the story on left-wing networks. And on her show, Senator Josh Hawley laughably tried to dismiss this as “griping about who is on a text message and who is not.” Jesse Watters tried to laugh it off, saying, “Did you ever try to start a group text? It’s hard.” And Sean Hannity claimed that the media just wants to distract from Trump’s supposed accomplishments, and he called the media “state-run.” I think he maybe forgot, Rosa, that the state is actually in the hands of Trump and his allies right now. But that aside, this spin seems almost desperate to me. What do you think?
Brooks: Oh, sure. Yeah, we all, and we absolute can, empathize with adding the wrong person to a group chat. Of course we can—which is why if you are the director of national intelligence, secretary of defense, and the national security adviser, you are not supposed to discuss war plans in a text group chat over commercial app. Duh, right? That is why you’re supposed to do it in a SCIF, a secure compartmentalized information facility. That’s why, if you’re doing audio or video calls, you’re supposed to be using secure audio and video technologies that are run and maintained by the government. That’s why you have 16 tedious layers of double-checking of everything before you have those conversations. Yes, it’s a pain in the butt, but the whole point of all of those boring procedures are to make sure that you don’t do exactly what they did do. So saying, Boy, it’s confusing to start a group chat? Yes, that’s the point. That’s why you don’t do this stuff over group chats
Sargent: That certainly seems inarguable to me the way you said it. I want to try to get at something, though. What is the chain of command here? It seems that the national security adviser Mike Waltz set this thing up. Is that how these things happen? In a situation where a bunch of the most senior people in the administration wants to deliberate about something like this, what is supposed to happen there?
Brooks: No. So it’s certainly common that the national security adviser would be the person to say, Hey, everybody, we have a decision that’s on the table. Maybe we have a proposal from one agency, but other agencies have equities, so we should discuss this. Or we have a decision. Or the president has raised this question, he’s asked for advice or he’s asked for an opinion on what to do here, so I want to bring everybody together in a Principals Committee. Essentially, they were doing what is typically called a Principals Committee meeting. And the principals are typically the cabinet secretaries; the deputies level are the people just beneath them. You have principals meetings, you have deputies meetings, and so forth. So that in itself is normal.
And I am, in fact, glad that they were at least having some discussion and that it’s not just Pete Hegseth goes off in a corner and bombs people without checking in with anybody beforehand. I appreciate that. That piece of it is normal process. The piece of it that is not normal process, as we’ve been discussing, is to do this over a commercial app in which you’ve accidentally included a journalist. Another piece that is troubling is it’s not really clear what people like Steve Miller are doing in that conversation—but that’s a whole other story.
Sargent: So what should have happened? In a normal administration, what would have happened?
Brooks: In a normal administration, what would have happened is that through secure channels, the national security adviser would have made all of the other principals aware through their staffs that he wanted to convene a Principals Committee meeting, which can be done virtually. All these people have classified mobile devices. Typically, any senior national security officials such as the secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence will have a home SCIF in their home. If they’re traveling, they can use a SCIF at an American embassy—most consulates and embassies have SCIFs, secure rooms for this purpose and secure video conferencing and audio facilities and so forth.
Part of the reason that you want to be ideally in a SCIF, even if you’re using a classified mobile device, is you don’t want to be, for instance, texting away on your classified mobile device at your kid’s little league game with a bunch of people looking over your shoulder or dictating your message into your classified device. [You don’t want to be] in a setting in which either the person sitting next to you or someone with a long-range microphone can pick up what you’re saying or [someone with] a long-range camera can see your screen.
It’s not just about the device itself, it’s about how you are connecting. Are you using commercial software that has not been vetted by the U.S. government to connect to that conference that you’re having, whether it’s by text or audio or video? You don’t want to be in a place where eavesdroppers or those with zoom lenses and so on can see what you’re doing. And we the United States, the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense of all people, know exactly how good U.S. surveillance technologies are, and exactly how good the surveillance technologies of U.S. adversaries—state adversaries such as Russia and China—are. You don’t need to be sitting next to somebody in the little league game in order to see their screen. Our satellite camera technologies are good enough that sometimes you can see that literally from the sky.
Normally, there are secure places to go to have that level of conversation. And is it an inconvenience? You bet it’s an inconvenience, but that’s why these folks get paid the big bucks as it were.
Sargent: You’d think. I want to go back to the Senate hearing for a sec because there was another set of exchanges that really underscores your point. It involves Senator Mark Kelly and DNI Gabbard and CIA Chief Ratcliffe. Here’s what happened.
Mark Kelly (audio voiceover): The deliberation as to whether or not we should launch a strike on another country—would you consider that classified information, Ms. Gabbard?
Gabbard (audio voiceover): Well, the information was not classified.
Kelly (audio voiceover): This is … This is not … I’m not talking about this. I’m just talking about deliberation from principals as to whether or not we should launch a strike on another country. Would you consider that classified information? I’m not talking about what happened this week.
Gabbard (audio voiceover): There are other factors that would go into determining that classification.
Kelly (audio voiceover): Mr. Ratcliffe, the deliberation between principals in our national security apparatus about whether or not to strike another country—would you consider that to be classified information?
John Ratcliffe (audio voiceover): Pre-decisional strike deliberation should be conducted through classified channels.
Sargent: Rosa, Ratcliffe straight up admits there that this should never have happened. That absolutely destroys Fox News’s spin about this. This also reinforces the broader point here, which is that this has just occurred entirely outside of any legible or even remotely grounded process, right?
Brooks: Yeah. Absolutely. They’re contradicting themselves all over the place. The White House did confirm the authenticity of the chat. On the one hand, they’re saying, Well, it’s authentic, but it wasn’t classified, but can Jeff Goldberg release the transcript? No, we wouldn’t want that to happen. Well, if it’s not classified, they should let him release it. If it’s classified, they should admit it’s classified, and they should fix this. If anyone else had been involved in this, good God. Can you imagine Joe Biden doing this? Can you imagine anyone in the Biden administration doing this? We know what happened with Hillary Clinton. We know what a big deal her emails were. This would be instant firings. Instant firings here.
They’re now trying to claim that it was a staff person who somehow mysteriously added Jeff Goldberg. I don’t believe they’ve released the name of this supposed staff person, but the buck stops with the principals. And again, I don’t know how many times and how many ways we can say this: This is why you do not do this stuff over a commercial app with no process. This is why you use the tried-and-true processes to safeguard that kind of conversation against eavesdropping: because you don’t want a situation where … I don’t know, what is Mike Waltz doing? Handing his phone to somebody and say, Oh hey, you set up the group chat, I’m not going to bother to take a look at it and even check? You can’t confirm the identity of people on Signal. There’s no way to do that. You can’t authenticate it. That’s why you’re not supposed to use Signal for this kind of conversation.
Sargent: Again, sounds inarguable to me. And concerning this, this effort by them to pin it on some unnamed supposedly existing staffer, Politico reports, according to a source very close to the White House, “everyone in the White House can agree on one thing, Mike Waltz is a effing idiot.” Now, I don’t know whether Mike Waltz is an idiot or not; but judging by what you’re saying about the process, this is somebody who really should have known what should have been done here. And he’s probably someone who should be fired for this, right?
Brooks: Every single person on that group chat should have known better. Every single person. I do know Mike Waltz. He’s not an idiot. I think this is an issue of humans…. He’s not an idiot more than humans in general are idiots. I don’t think you will find a human being who has worked for any executive branch who hasn’t, at some point or another, screwed up and used the wrong device or whatever. It happens because people are human; they forget and they’re in a hurry and they do stuff that if they had thought about it a little more they would go, Oh shoot, I shouldn’t have done that.
But the many layers of fuck-ups involved here, and the fact that it involved every single principal level national security leader in the Trump administration…. This wasn’t one person with a brief onetime lapse for one thing. I don’t think we know how many people were part of that group total together—we know a number of the participants, but not all of them—but not a single one of them said, Oh, guys, we should not be doing this over this channel or guys, we can’t authenticate who is on this chat. That is the really mind-blowing piece. And it raises the question: What else are they doing in a slipshod manner? What else are they doing in a half-assed manner? What else are they doing in an insecure manner?
And we haven’t talked about the actual damage to U.S. interests. If you’re an ally of the U.S., you’re not sharing intelligence with the U.S. anymore because they’re going to be criminally negligent with the information you shared. The Jeffrey Goldberg article in The Atlantic suggests that among other things, they used the identities of human intelligence assets and referred specifically to other intelligence methods and assets as well as weapon systems, as well as named targets. If you’re a U.S. ally, you’re not going to share intelligence with us.
Sargent: OK, Rosa, I’ve saved the best for last. It’s Trump’s latest response to this whole thing. He’s sitting there with Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, and he does this almost rote gesture of slapping Mike Waltz on the wrist so gently, it’s almost incredible. And then Mike Waltz says, Of course, we’re going to keep the network secure, sir. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): I think it’s something you should look into.
Michael Waltz (audio voiceover): Yes, sir, we are. We have our technical experts looking at it. We have our legal teams looking at it. And of course, we’re going to keep everything as secure as possible. No one in your national security team would ever put anyone in danger. And as you’ve said, and we’ve repeatedly said, the attack was phenomenal, and it’s ongoing. But the media wants to talk about everything else except for the hostages you’re getting out of the Middle East, Iran on its back foot, sea lanes getting reopened, peace in Europe. As we just saw today with the Black Sea ceasefire, we were just on with Steve Witkoff, myself, our team in Saudi Arabia. They want to talk about all this other stuff except for your amazing successes and the successes of your team.
Sargent: So Rosa, there it all is. Mike Waltz knows better than anyone that the way to avoid accountability in Trump’s eyes is to praise the audience of one. And he just did it as unctuously and obsequiously as you possibly can imagine. This is not what we want in a leader at times like this. Is it?
Brooks: Oh, Mr. President, you are very handsome and so very brilliant. Look, that’s the way Trump operates. We know that he will jettison people who he thinks are being critical of him. Mike Waltz knows which side his bread is buttered on. Honestly, although I think, as I said earlier, that in any normal universe, Mike Waltz would have resigned yesterday, I almost hope he won’t because the people waiting in the wings behind Mike Waltz are a lot worse than Mike Waltz. This was careless to the point of criminal negligence, but Mike Waltz is not a raving lunatic. And frankly, some of the folks in Trump’s orbit are raving lunatics. I would rather have Mike Waltz as national security adviser than almost all the possible alternatives in Trumpworld right now.
And I would love to think that this, however, would be the tipping point in terms of Republicans in Congress and their willingness to themselves just be obsequious and kowtow to Trump. I would like to believe that at least some of those Republicans in Congress do care about American national security, even if they don’t care about much of anything else, but I think that the perfect, perfect two months that President Trump is boasting of—and that Mike Waltz is telling him he’s just had—suggests that the only thing perfect about it has been the perfect obsequiousness of Republicans in Congress. I’d like to believe that this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for Republicans in Congress in terms of willing to say on every possible level, in every possible way, Woah, Donald, you’re going too far, stop. But given the total lack of spine that Republicans in Congress have shown thus far, I’m not getting my hopes up.
Sargent: Rosa, I think it’s going to have to get much, much, much worse for anything like that to happen. And unfortunately, I think it is going to get much, much, much worse. Rosa Brooks, thank you so much for coming on with us today.
Brooks: My pleasure.
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.
The post Transcript: Trump Text Fiasco Worsens as Brutal Details Wreck Fox Spin appeared first on New Republic.
