Even the chief national security correspondent at Fox News is calling bullshit on the Trump administration’s Signalgate story.
Trump and co. are sticking to the story that the Signal chat that The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was added to did not contain any classified information, even though the messages contained precise timing about plans to bomb Yemen. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Press Secretary Karoline Laeavitt have been steadfast in this.
Fox’s Jennifer Griffin thinks they’re lying.
“There is a debate about whether the operational details Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared in the Signal Group Chat were ’classified’or not. So I surveyed a range of current and former US defense officials who agreed ‘war plans’ is not the right term but what was shared may have been FAR MORE sensitive given the operational details and time stamps ahead of the operation, which could have placed US military pilots in harms way,” Griffin wrote.
“What Hegseth shared two hours ahead of the strikes were time sensitive ‘attack orders’ or ‘operational plans’ with actual timing of the strikes and mention of F18s, MQ9 Reapers and Tomahawks. This information is typically sent through classified channels to the commanders in the field as ‘secret, no [form] message. In other words the information is ‘classified’ and should not be shared through insecure channels.”
Griffin continued. “This kind of real time operational information is more sensitive than ‘war plans,’ which makes this lapse more egregious, according to two former senior US defense officials. ‘This information was clearly classified,’ according to former senior defense official #1.The Defense Secretary can retroactively declassify information after the fact, but the fact that this was shared in real time before the strike took place makes it unlikely to have been declassified when it was being shared and seen by the journalist for The Atlantic who was inadvertently included in the Signal chat.”
It says a lot when the administration’s own media wing is starting to get tired of its gaffes.
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