We Must Pay Attention to the Group Text
The Democrats are finally fighting and I want to see more of it
I’m breaking my social media fast to come talk to you about the boys running our country planning war on the group chat. But don’t worry. I am going to return to the fast and finish out my two weeks as strong as I can. So much to tell you about this time of rest coming very soon.
First, what can you do right now? You can call your reps, all of them, and say you want Pete Hegseth removed as the Secretary of Defense and you want them to take action on this ASAP. Let them know that you are watching and that you want them pushing on this issue. What happened was an enormous breach of national security and we cannot just let it be swept under the rug. Thankfully, a lot of Democrats are raising hell about this. We’ll get into more of that below.
SCRIPT: Hi, I’m a constituent, I’m calling to demand you push for Pete Hegseth to resign. I’m deeply concerned about the national security implications of war planning on a Signal chat.
Now let’s do a breakdown of what has happened. I know how many memes and bits of info are floating around social media. I think it is so important to have all of the facts in front of us when we talk about something this big. Many good friends of mine have texted with half truths they found online. It’s a consequence of how we consume news now and when so much is at stake we need to stay fully informed.
What exactly happened?
The nation’s top national security officials planned a military operation in Yemen on Signal and we know about it because Michael Waltz, the National Security Advisor, added the Editor in Chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat. YES HE ADDED A JOURNALIST TO THE CHAT.
The group chat was started after a meeting in the Situation Room. They chose to do the planning via the encrypted messaging program Signal with message expiration turned on. This means there would be no official record kept of the conversations in the long run. It also means these messages could be vulnerable to someone outside the government. Last year China hacked unencrypted government systems. In February, the NSA warned other government employees not to use Signal because it was vulnerable to Russian hackers. Classified government communication is supposed to go through secure government servers. This did not.
The March 15th attack was against the Houthis, an Iranian-backed group that has disrupted billions of dollars of international trade in the Red Sea. 13 people were killed. See more here.
In the chat Vice President JD Vance said he wasn’t sure the attack should move forward, "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.” He also questioned the President, saying: "I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There's a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc."
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth responded to the “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”
Once he realized that the chat was real and not a hoax, Goldberg discussed this with his team at The Atlantic and released a story about this enormous breach of security, but he initially held back some of the texts because he didn’t want to compromise classified information. The Atlantic has since released the information they kept back in order to let the public make up their own mind (more on that below)
So how did the Republicans respond to this?
Cue up Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me.” In classic Trumpian fashion they downplayed this, blew it off, changed their story, minimized the impact and redirected any wrongdoing to literally anyone else with a pulse. It’s just another “witch hunt.”
For days they have denied that any classified information was shared in the conversation. Though yesterday in the Oval Office indicated he may be backtracking, “That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know. I’m not sure, you have to ask the various people involved.”
We have always known that Trump chose these people because they are loyalists, but reading the chat and seeing the defense of it makes clear how that affects policy.
President Trump engaged in his usual deflecting personal attack, “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic … To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business.”
Our head of Defense and former Fox News Personality Pete Hegseth likewise went on attack, calling Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” and (creating the clips that conservative viewers can see in their alternative reality,) “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, posted on social media that “no ‘war plans’ were discussed” and “no classified material was sent to the thread.”
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were pressed by Democratic Senators at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing and denied that the messages contained classified material, because Secretary Pete Hegseth gets to decide what’s classified.
Gabbard finally called it a mistake that a reporter was added to the chat.
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted on social media that “at every turn anti-Trump forces have tried to weaponize innocuous actions and turn them into faux outrage that Fake News outlets can use to peddle misinformation. Don’t let enemies of America get away with these lies.”
Fox News’s Sean Hannity picked up what they were putting down and said the whole thing is a “smear” being “waged by the left.
In response to all of this The Atlantic released the sensitive text messages to allow the public to decide for themselves, saying:
The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.
Here is an example of the texts From Hegseth which definitely sound like war planning to me:
“1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
“1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
“1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”
“MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”
“We are currently clean on OPSEC”—that is, operational security.
“Godspeed to our Warriors.”
My take on all this:
This was a major fuck up and it is also a major opportunity for Dems to go on the offense in a way that we just haven’t seen enough of.