We’ve all texted or emailed someone by mistake, but it’s unacceptable to accidentally message someone about matters in which American service members’ lives are at risk. If any lower-level officials in our government did such a thing, they would lose their jobs — or at the very least be severely punished, and deservedly so.
President Trump made pretty clear on Wednesday evening that he wasn’t eager to fire anyone over The Atlantic’s editor being inadvertently added to a chat in which senior officials openly discussed U.S. military plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen before they occurred. Trump told reporters that people should be focused instead on the success of the military strikes. “There was no harm done,” he said of the group chat, adding that Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, had taken responsibility for it — though he did spend some time questioning the validity of Signal.
It is clear now, however, that Trump — who issued an executive order on government accountability — needs to hold someone accountable for what occurred. Otherwise, it sets an unacceptable precedent that this can happen again.
It’s not been explained how or why senior government officials are using Signal, a publicly available messaging application, when the U.S. government spends millions of dollars on encrypted classified networks and information security. One after another, senior officials have publicly avoided serious responsibility for what occurred.
Waltz, who reportedly included Goldberg on the chat, said he was responsible for creating the chat but tried to sidestep the blunder. “Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there? Right? You’ve got somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact,” he said in an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News on Tuesday.
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, reiterated on Wednesday that he didn’t text “war plans.” But as messages newly released by The Atlantic show, he’s simply playing semantics. The reported messages show that he texted the precise time when U.S. Navy fighter jets would launch from aircraft carriers at sea and the time they would release their bombs over Houthi targets.
If the Houthis or other adversaries, rather than Goldberg, had this information, it would make those combat pilots’ lives even more vulnerable as they executed their mission. The Houthis have shot down U.S. drones with antiaircraft weapons.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said on Wednesday that someone “made a big mistake” in inviting Goldberg to the group chat. John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who both participated in the chat, testified in front of Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday that they didn’t disclose classified information. That may be technically accurate, but they spoke openly about an ongoing operation in front of someone who wasn’t authorized to know about it.
I’m confident that neither Ratcliffe nor Gabbard would invite Goldberg to sit in on their briefings about the lead-up to a strike. So why they wouldn’t admit a mistake was made is beyond comprehension.
It’s difficult to hold public confidence in the information security apparatus if the response from the officials involved is a comedic defense of their own actions — the national security adviser can’t fully explain how he texted someone and cabinet secretaries play word games on the contents of a conversation that the entire world can now read for themselves.
In previous administrations, this matter would be investigated by the Defense Department’s inspector general, but Trump fired him during the first week of his second term. Regardless, haphazardly disclosing sensitive information about a planned and ongoing military operation cannot be permissible. The fact that no one has admitted real wrongdoing or acknowledged a lesson was learned makes it even more unbearable.
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