All Of The Trump Signalgate Perps Should Lose Their Jobs— But Some Actually Need To Go The Prison

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On Tuesday, former Trump national security adviser John Bolton noted that “It’s inconceivable to me that people would not use the classified channels that the government has spent so much time and effort and money over decades trying to make as uncompromisable as they can. And whether it’s secure videos, secure telephones, secure text or email kinds of things, the channels are there. It’s not like they don’t exist. Why would you ever not use them?”

So it makes sense to wonder why these morons choose Signal to do national security business. Was its to avoid any records of what they are doing as required under the Presidential Records Act? It’s illegal to use an off government site that leaves no records. I’ll bet they’ve been doing this since January 20— illegal as hell… criminals all. But this isn’t even part of the discussion. Of course they knew exactly what they were doing. If it weren't for Jeffrey Goldberg no one would know except our enemies hacking their cell phones. It would be business as usual for these incompetent, unqualified clowns, flipping the bird at national security and the law. That’s despite Trump calling it “a glitch [that] turned out not to be a serious one.”

The NY Times got a little closer: “In years past, the move by senior members of President Trump’s administration to share defense secrets over the Signal messaging app would have represented a serious breach that would have likely prompted investigations by the FBI and the Justice Department’s national security division. Yet so far, neither the attorney general, Pam Bondi, nor the FBI director, Kash Patel, appear to be planning to investigate whether the communications described in a bombshell report in The Atlantic magazine on Monday potentially violated federal laws like the Espionage Act. The bureau and the department have undertaken these kind of investigations to figure out the extent of damage to the country’s national security, uncover other instances of recklessness and examine whether laws have been broken. Such an inquiry would be independent from— and far more thorough than— the self-policing, in-house review by the National Security Council announced on Tuesday. What Bondi and Patel do next is an important early test for two officials who promised during their confirmation hearings to administer justice impartially and free from political considerations that, in their view, led to criminal prosecutions of Trump during the Biden administration.”

“This is something that would normally be investigated by the FBI and DOJ,” said Mary McCord, a longtime senior official for the Justice Department who now teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center.

“Even if a person is in lawful possession of national defense information, putting it on Signal— which is not an approved, secure means of communicating such information— prosecutors could determine it was gross negligence, which is a felony,” McCord said.

…The dilemma faced by Bondi and Patel, both outspoken surrogates for Trump during the 2024 campaign, has added importance given their maximalist approach to punishing political adversaries found to have improperly handled national security secrets.

Both Bondi and Patel, along with most of the participants in the Signal chat, were among those who said that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted for using a private email server to discuss governmental matters a decade ago.

“Hillary Clinton actually committed a crime through her handling of classified documents and was preemptively exonerated— a two-tiered justice system,” Patel wrote in his book Government Gangsters, published in 2023.

In one of her first appearances on the national political stage, in 2016, Bondi, then the attorney general of Florida, basked in anti-Clinton chants during a speech to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

“Lock her up!” Bondi said, echoing the audience. “I love that!”

While Signal is an encrypted program, its use is explicitly prohibited under a 2023 Defense Department memo that bans “non-D.O.D. messaging systems” and “unclassified systems, government-issued or otherwise, for classified national security information.” Gabbard said she did not believe the information shared in the messages was classified. The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, argued that Hegseth has said the information was not classified, though he added that he had no way of verifying Hegseth’s claims.

Trump also echoed those claims at the White House on Tuesday.

But former officials who handled highly sensitive information said the reported description of military targets, weapons to be used, and the sequence and timing of the strikes on Houthi sites discussed in the group chat would likely involve classified material, whether it was marked that way or not.

By Wednesday morning, Politico reported the Trump Signalgate group was circling the wagons. “So,” wrote Jack Blanchard, “inside 24 hours… We’ve watched Hegseth flat-deny what seems pretty clear evidence of battle plans being leaked. We’ve watched Gabbard and Ratcliffe sitting side by side in the Senate giving jarringly different answers— one willing to respond, the other largely not. We’ve watched Waltz give deeply unconvincing performances in the Oval Office and on Fox. And we’ve watched Waltz and Trump seemingly contradict one another about who was or wasn’t to blame.”

Trump’s main concern was that Waltz having Goldberg’s phone number might be an indication that someone was leaking inside information to him. Blanchard added that “What we’re watching here is the first major gaffe of the new administration— or at least the first since the aborted federal payments freeze of the first week. Since then, this administration has appeared way more competent than Trump’s first, which was plagued by farcical errors and scandals. But this story feels like something straight out of Trump 1.0— and crucially, the clean-up operation has not been much better. Dems will be encouraged by all of that.”

Goldberg’s follow-up in The Atlantic Wednesday puts the lie to the Signalgate group’s bullshit about no secret plans being shared. “Nobody was texting war plans,” lied a probably inebriated Hegseth. Gabbard and Ratcliffe claimed “there was no classified material shared” at a Senate hearing. (Lying to Congress is a crime.) Deception. 

On top of that Juan Cole added that it’s “a security breach of gargantuan proportions. Yes, the whole exchange was illegal according to the US Official Records Act, according to which important government discussions and decisions must be documented in lasting media. But the truly sad dimension of the SNAFU is not the revelation that the Trump Administration is the Gang that couldn’t Shoot Straight, in Jimmy Breslin’s phrase. We knew that. It is that seasoned military personnel like Waltz, a former Special Operations colonel in Afghanistan, appear to have learned nothing from America’s longest failed military campaign, the absurdly named ‘war on terror.’ It was more often a ‘war of terror,’ which left hundreds of thousands dead and millions homeless… Hegseth wrote in response Vice President JD Vance’s suggestion that bombing Yemen be put off a month to see what the situation with oil prices will be,

“VP: I understand your concerns ” and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what “nobody knows who the Houthis are” which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

“Hegseth is not saying that nobody knows who the Houthis are in the sense that they are an unknown quantity. He is saying that the Trump MAGA base does not know who the Houthis in Yemen are, and therefore it is a tough task to convince them to shed their isolationism and support this military action. Trump’s brand is that he claimed to have opposed the Iraq War and doesn’t want to spend American blood and treasure abroad. So, his base may ask, why is he bombing the bejesus out of Yemen, and what the hell is Yemen? Hegseth is actually just a talking head from the Fox stable of fatuous prevaricators, and is the least qualified secretary of defense in American history. That is why his comments are on public messaging. He is advising that the Trump team blame Biden for the Houthis’ continued operations against commercial vessels in the Red Sea, which they conduct in order to protest the Israeli genocide against the civilians of Gaza. And he thinks that although no one in MAGA cares about Yemen, the Houthis, or the Red Sea, they may be gotten on board if the Houthis can be configured as a cat’s paw of Iran. Hegseth himself, of course, has no idea whether the Houthis have a command line to Tehran. (They don’t.) He is inadvertently revealing that the tag line of 'Iran-backed' that is routinely applied to the Houthis is US government propaganda, undertaken for public relations purposes. Iran does, of course, give the Houthis some money and armaments, but the Houthis would be there even if Iran did not exist— they are a native Yemeni movement of the Zaydi branch of Shiism, which is not connected to the Twelver Shiism of Iran. And the Houthis aren’t hitting ships in the Red Sea because Iran tells them to. Iran, which is close to China, may not even want Red Sea trade disrupted for Beijing. The Houthis lead a coalition of tribes, many of which are Sunni Muslims, and they need unifying issues with a pan-Islamic appeal. The genocide in Gaza fills that bill, since all Yemenis are upset about it. In fact, throughout the world, only sociopaths are not upset about the atrocities conducted by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Hegseth is making this argument because JD Vance had written, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

Vance later added, “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

The vice president’s point is that Trump administration bombing of Yemen to protect Red Sea shipping primarily benefits Europe and US interests here are minor. He thinks that bombing the Houthis and patrolling the Red Sea is a European responsibility, not an American one.

It is interesting that Vance does not bring up Israel as a consideration. Surely the main reason Trump is bombing Yemen is to enable Netanyahu to continue his genocide unimpeded, not to ensure freedom of navigation, which the US does not actually believe in or it would not arbitrarily confiscate Iranian oil tankers.

So, yes, doing military planning by Signal is illegal, and yes emailing sensitive security and military documents to a journalist who used to serve in the Israeli military as a prison guard is a major breach of national security.

But the shame of these email messages is that they do not show an understanding of the limits of air power in guerrilla war, they misunderstand what actions might constitute real deterrence, and they show that for the Trump team the entire exercise is a mere performance for the public. Vance comes across as the smartest of them, since he realizes that the MAGA base doesn’t likely want this performance, anyway, and that the attempt at one-upman-ship with Biden on Red Sea policy could backfire in the Red States because it just looks like more Bidenism.

Supposedly, there were 18 people on the Signalgate chat besides Goldberg. Some haven’t had their identities disclosed. These are the ones who have:

• Seth Hegseth

• JD Vance

• Mike Waltz

• Tulsi Gabbard

• Marco Rubio

• John Ratcliffe

• Scott Bessent

• Steve Witkoff

• Susie Wiles

• Stephen Miller

• Joe Kent, MAGA crackpot, twice-failed House candidate and Trump’s nominee for National Counterterrorism Center Director, despite not yet being Senate-confirmed.