The inclusion of The Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in Donald Trump’s group chat on Signal that discussed highly confidential war plans, is not new information now. Goldberg was not only part of that plan, he also wrote an article on the same, which led to the Democrats asking for an investigation.
However, when Trump was asked about the same, he simply denied knowing anything about the incident. What is interesting here is that he did not mention once that he and his administration will get to the bottom of what happened given the nature of the incident. Given the fact that this can be considered as a security breach, Trump’s behavior appears rather reckless and The New Republic brought in veteran national security lawyer Bradley Moss to talk about the same.
On the podcast The Daily Blast from The New Republic, host Greg Sargent asked Moss to give a better insight into the situation that consisted of Jeffrey Goldberg getting included in a Signal chat that had National security adviser Mike Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among other government officials and talked about “their upcoming plans to bomb Yemen’s Houthis to open up shipping in the Red Sea.”
In response, Moss said, “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.”
He further added, “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.”
Moss also mentioned, “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 then asked him if Signal is an appropriate platform for holding such serious and confidential discussions since it was not an approved channel and can be breached by third parties. Moss’ response to this was, “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.”
Sargent then moved to the point of Trump denying anything about this incident and saying, “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?”
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Moss went on to explain how this makes the whole situation worse. He said, “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.”
He then added, “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.”
Trump’s rant only made him look more incompetent as a President as Moss mentioned. The valid response to such a serious situation should have involved a spokesperson from the government who should have clarified things. Instead of that Trump went on a defensive mode, which makes him look unaware of things going around him and that is definitely not a good look for the President of America.
