The Left – in the form of the establishment media and their allies in the Democratic Party –
have been pounding away on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz for somehow including Far Left propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic in a Signal discussion of the recent attacks on the Houthis, Iran’s terrorist clients in Yemen.
We will stipulate that, as the former holder of a security clearance, this was kind of a dumb self-own. However, it is hardly the big deal The Atlantic and others on the Left are making it out to be in their breathless clickbait articles attacking Waltz and Hegseth.
The real damage that was done was not through the revelations of the content of the Signal chat, it was to the image of the Trump administration as the more capable team to manage our national security affairs – like we said, a self-own, or own goal if you are a soccer fan.
However, there are some things about this matter worth pursuing, and the first one is how Mr. Goldberg got included in the chat.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe testified that Signal was preloaded on his government phone, and one could fairly assume that the others had Signal preloaded on theirs as well.
National Security Advisor Waltz has said that it looks like he accidentally added Goldberg to the chat, but that he’s never met or spoken to Mr. Goldberg – a known anti-Trump anti-Republican polemicist – and has no idea how Goldberg’s Signal handle got on his phone.
So, was Goldberg’s Signal handle preloaded on Mike Waltz’s government phone?
Suspicion has fallen on one of Waltz’s deputies as the source of the screw-up, but we are not going to name him and trash the guy’s reputation on the basis of mere suspicion.
Now, here’s another weird angle to the story. On March 18, a few days after the chat (which took place on March 14), but before the whole thing broke, the Pentagon issued an operational security alert (Op Sec Alert) warning against using Signal, even for unclassified communications.
So, how weird is it that all the top people on the new administration’s national security team were issued phones with an unsecure communications ap on them. If it was unsecure even for unclassified communications, what were they supposed to communicate through Signal, Sunday School lessons and their kids’ sports schedules?
And there’s another weird thing at work in this fake news scandal – the timing.
Goldberg apparently got invited to the chat on March 14, but he didn’t break the story until March 24, right before President Trump’s national security team was supposed to testify on Capitol Hill. Sitting on a hot story for a week is uncharacteristic of any journalist, particularly in today’s media environment of the 24-hour news cycle and the dog-eat-dog competition for clicks and eyeballs on screens.
Unless of course your goal is not to sell magazines or views on screen, but to damage Donald Trump and change the narrative for a major congressional hearing.
So, here’s the bottom line: There are a lot of weird coincidences that came together to make the Trump Team’s Signal chat about the Houthi attack into an international frontpage story. However, the unclassified substance of the discussion is not particularly newsworthy, and Republicans on Capitol Hill and others who support the MAGA agenda shouldn’t give it any further legs, doing so only distracts from and undermines the pursuit of President Trump’s heretofore successful national security agenda.
