The Five Scandals (and One Fascinating Political Insight) of Signalgate

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Today, after 24 hours where the Trump administration stonewalled and lied about the full scope of “Signalgate,” The Atlantic went ahead and published the full group chat, including operational details and a participants’ list that it had previously withheld because Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris turn out to be more responsible with the nation’s secrets than the most senior members of the president’s Cabinet.

Across the last 48 hours, “Signalgate” has morphed from one scandal — the insane inclusion of one of the nation’s top journalists in one of the world’s most elite and secret group chats into what I think is best thought of as five distinct but overlapping scandals, as well as providing some fascinating political insight into who has power and how decisions get made in Trump II.

Let’s break down the five scandals first, any one of which should be cause for resignations, congressional hearings, criminal investigations, or even a special prosecutor:

1) A massive leak of sensitive information. This is the clear, first-order, simplest-to-understand scandal: The president’s own national security advisor added a top journalist to a text thread and then the secretary of defense posted a bunch of classified information and the nation’s top officials debated and then celebrated a successful military action without being clear that they were doing so in front of one of the most experienced national security analysts of our time. Late Monday, Pete Hegseth — in something that can only be described as a drunken-frat-boy-angling-for-a-late-night fight-in-a-college-bar rant — attacked Jeffrey Goldberg and largely seemed to deride the entire thing as a hoax. “Nobody was texting war plans,” he said, despite a National Security Council confirmation saying the conversation thread appeared to be authentic. 

The spin since has focused on how this wasn’t any ole big deal and nothing anyone should bother caring about, but the full publication of the group chat’s operational details make clear that at the very least the information shared would have been appropriately classified at the “secret” level. In fact, the information in the chat — specific details, including the aircraft, weapons, and timing of an impending military action, is as basic a level of obviously classified information as one can get. In fact, following the Pentagon’s own guidance, it’s even clear that one should bias towards overclassifying “overall operational plans” at the start of an operation. Here’s a graphic prepared by a former CIA attorney putting side-by-side the text thread and the classification guidelines:

Any denials or obfuscation or too-cute-by-half arguments about whether this was technically a “classified war plan” is belied by the simplest public understanding of the texts and their content. This is, as Joe Biden would say, a BFD.

2) Perjury to Congress. The release of the full texts today by The Atlantic make clear that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe danced all the way up to the line multiple times yesterday of perjuring themselves before a congressional hearing—and, almost certainly, over it. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” DNI Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday during a previously scheduled annual “worldwide threats” hearing.

She and Ratcliffe repeated versions of that quote many times, and we should be rightly concerned — and worried and horrified! — about how casually two of the nation’s most senior national security officials misled (and, more accurately, lied to) Congress and the American people under oath. Congress should be outraged over this on both sides of the aisle. Once the perjury starts, checks and balances start to fall aside. As I wrote on Monday: There is no shame in this administration — and that, in and of itself, should deeply deeply concern us as citizens. A functioning democracy requires public officials capable of shame and embarrassment and accountability.

3) A clear (and clearly criminal) violation of the Federal Records Act. I also wrote Monday hours after the first publication that the whole event indicates that the Trump administration is clearly conducting business on Signal as a way to evade conversations being rightly preserved under the Federal Records Act. It’s clear from how they engage on the thread that this is routine — and it makes clear there are probably all sorts of Signal group chats taking place simultaneously on other troubling topics. Surely the same Signal text threads existed on other topics — like, for instance, the decision to ignore a court order stopping the extraordinary rendition of those hundreds of detainees to a life of slave labor in El Salvador. Surely Stephen Miller, who was a major participant on the Waltz-Hegseth Signal group had the same communications going about the detainee flights—and probably other topics.

Now we have even more clear evidence: The new, full Signal chat shows how Mike Waltz changed the Signal group chat “disappearing messages” timeline from one week to four weeks — that is about as clear a sign of “intent” as a prosecutor could hope to find if you conducting a criminal investigation into an official’s attempts to circumvent the Federal Records Act by destroying protected government communications and records. He actively changed the setting!

There are a million questions to be answered now in court — and, one hopes, congressional hearings will dig into these violations with anywhere near the enthusiasm that we spent years of hearings about Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

To me, the Signal group chat is best understood as an artifact of the January 6^th investigation: The Trump team is operating less like a government and more like a mafia family — it learned the danger from the text messages uncovered by the January 6^th Committee investigation and now doesn’t want to leave a trace about debate and decisions.

4) A government IT scandal. Remember how exercised the entire national media and particularly the GOP (and even James Comey!) got over Hillary Clinton’s emails? This is way way way way worse—particularly at this exact moment in time.

A major part of the conversation I’ve had with former government officials over the last 48 hours has focused on what might be called the second-order scandal inside Signalgate: What devices, exactly, were these group chats being conducted on? There are two options, both troublesome for different reasons: The Cabinet members are either chatting away on their personal devices or they’ve installed Signal, a commercial application, on their government cell phones or desktop computers. Asked in yesterday’s hearing, Gabbard refused to say whether she was using a personal device or a government device. She didn’t answer because either answer is trouble.

To fully understand how compromising and worrisome this Signal exchange is, one needs to pull back and understand one of the biggest cybersecurity threats of the moment. For months, US officials have been pulling out their hair over a set of Chinese intrusions broadly known as “Salt Typhoon.” Salt Typhoon has been absolutely pillaging US telecom networks in recent months, in ways that it’s not even clear the US government and network providers fully understand six months later. Last fall, there was public reporting that Salt Typhoon had attempted to compromise Donald Trump’s and JD Vance’s phones. It’s not clear at all that the government and telecom providers are out of the woods on Salt Typhoon yet.

All of which raises the question: Who else was reading the Signal group chat (and other Signal group chats)? Odds are non-zero that at least China and perhaps Russia would have been able to read those conversations too if they were happening on the officials’ personal devices—and perhaps even if they were happening on nonsecure government devices.

Sure, Signal messages are encrypted between devices, but they are not encrypted if you get access to the underlying device — that’s routinely how law enforcement is able to uncover conspiracies among people who think they’re communicating securely. So if Salt Typhoon or another so-called “Advanced Persistent Threat” from a foreign adversary has successfully exploited the personal devices of a Cabinet official or, say, Vice President Vance, there’s every possibility they read the chat too. And if the officials instead are installing Signal on their official government devices or, particularly, their government desktops, that doesn’t bode well for how seriously their taking their own “infosec.” (There’s good reason to believe that the Trump administration is installing Signal on the devices of senior officials, against the government’s own recommendations.) As one former senior US official said to me yesterday: “Once you own the phone or PC, game over. You have all the chats unencrypted.”

Also, not for nothing, it’s come out that at least one member of the group chat, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff was in Russia at the time of the conversation, a place where US officials are supposed to extra super duper careful about their IT systems and comms systems. 

One of the most head-scratching aspects of this particular thread of scandal is how unnecessary it all was: Everyone in this group chat has entire teams of people who travel with them everywhere to allow them to have constant secure communications systems. They travel with classified devices and even entire portable “SCIFs,” Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, specially designed to protect against electronic eavesdropping; the government even installs SCIFs in their homes and they travel on expensive military aircraft with secure communications so they’re able to safely engage in classified conversations whenever needed. The fact they’re in a group text on, quite possible, their personal devices? Bonkers. 

This IT and cybersecurity scandal, by the way, is consistent with an administration that’s playing too fast and too loose with serious IT questions and secure communications systems: Just last week came word that Elon Musk has installed Starlink across the White House complex, which for anyone who understands the security of networks in a place like the White House, is just insanity.

5) Some light war crimes. Lost amid all the tumult of the context of the group chat is the content itself. You probably didn’t even realize until Signalgate broke Monday the US had even conducted military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen on the weekend of March 15-16^th . Most Americans — my brilliant and engaged readers aside, of course! — probably don’t even know who the Houthis are or why the US is launching airstrikes against them. Yet we’ve been engaged in a nearly two-year running naval battle with the Yemen-based group. (This is a good explainer by CFR’s Michael Froman if you want some background.) It’s one that’s been incredibly expensive to the US in dollars and very deadly on the Houthi side and in Yemen—and it’s basically never been a major headline in the US.

Reporting at the time last weekend estimated that the US attack discussed in the Signal group chat killed about 31 people, and now the new group chat screenshots gives us some fresh perspective, including this: We have clear documentary evidence of US officials targeting an entire civilian building to kill a single target.

According to local reports, most of those killed were women and children, and the Houthis’ political bureau described the attacks at the time as a “war crime” — and it appears they were probably technically correct. As my online friend Southpaw wrote, “Targeting an individual for assassination at a building known to be his romantic partner’s residence by collapsing the whole structure seems to me to fall squarely within the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on targeting civilian objects, and probably other defined war crimes as well.”

Now I should be clear: This is a scandal that all of us — every American — bears some responsibility for by 2025. It is not the sole fault of Trump II. Every presidential administration of the 21^st century has been remarkably casual about “Global War on Terror” strikes that have all the hallmarks of war crimes, operations targeting mostly “terrorists” that have killed hundreds and hundreds of civilians in probably a dozen different countries overseas. It’s a national disgrace, distinct and apart from the IT and national security implications of Signalgate, and one that deserves at least passing mention in any fulsome analysis of the text chains, even as the actual outrage that we all clutch our pearls about are only Scandals #1 - #4 above. (I actually wrote in 2021 my own article in The Atlantic about about how mistaken our entire national strategy has been since 9/11.)

We’re nearly 25 years after 9/11 now and our country has learned some terrible lessons from decades of drone strikes and air strikes and the widespread abuse of the Authorization of Use of Military Force to justify death and destruction in places from the front pages. Sometime that is not now and may not be anytime soon, we as a nation need to reckon with how casual we’ve gotten about using military force overseas against largely civilian targets in fights that the American people don’t really understand.

* * *

Now that we’ve gotten the political and security scandals out of the way, onto what is not necessarily a scandal but is a fascinating political insight that we can glean from the Signal group chat and resulting fall-out: Who holds the power in the Trump administration?

The full Signal chat provides some of the most “real” indications of where power lies in the Trump administration and how decision-making happens—and none of it is pretty.

The answer is shocking, but perhaps not surprising: Donald Trump isn’t that engaged in the policy of his administration, JD Vance is weak and powerless, and the only one that matters is Stephen Miller.

I wrote earlier this week about how fascinating it was to see how none of the senior officials seemed all that clear about what Donald Trump himself had wanted. The subsequent leaks of the full conversation only underscore how Stephen Miller — who, mind you, is not a national security official who would be normally involved in a military strike overseas — is the one who shuts down the debate over whether the action moves ahead: Miller, in fact, is only added to the group after people aren’t sure of the president’s wishes. Is Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, really not in a position to interpret the president’s own orders when it comes to military actions? He needs to call Stephen Miller for help? This is not a smooth functioning organization. Nor one where the president is sweating committing US lives to action or taking lives overseas.

Then we get to another part of the power dynamics we’re learning from the chat: JD Vance is powerless. Any other vice president in the last half-century could have and absolutely would have gotten the national security advisor immediately fired over this scandal. Let’s summarize it as such: The national security advisor accidentally included a top journalist in an exclusive backroom chat of the administration’s senior-most officials, where the vice president expressed his private disagreement with the president’s public policy decisions. How on earth can JD Vance let that stand?

The answer appears to be, simply: He doesn’t have the juice to get Waltz, who he doesn’t like in the first place, fired. Imagine what Kamala Harris would have done to Jake Sullivan if he’d been responsible for airing her disagreements with Biden in the press; imagine what Joe Biden would have done to Tom Donilon; or even what Dick Cheney would have done to Stephen Hadley? Any of them would have been cashiered by day’s end. The fact that Mike Waltz is still standing as the scandal enters day three shows us JD Vance is the weakest vice president we’ve had in decades.

Thanks for reading — if you have any of your own thoughts or angles of this story, and/or want to add me to your own group chats, I’m vermontgmg.14 on Signal. That’s my normal username, everywhere, with an extra Vermont: the 14th state.

GMG

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