I haven’t had time to comment on the Jeff Goldberg story about the war cabinet planning a military campaign on the Signal app. So a few brief thoughts.
To state the obvious, in any normal administration Hegseth and Waltz at a minimum would be gone by the end of the day. So let me stipulate to all the outrageousness. But I want to focus your attention on the fact that information security is not the only, perhaps not even the main issue.
Note that no one in the chat is saying, “Hey, we sure it’s cool to be talking about this on Signal?” Or, “Should we be worried this is an insecure channel?” That and the simple logic of the matter tells us this is commonplace in the new administration. You think Mike Waltz got fat fingers and accidentally added Goldberg on the first time out? Not likely.
Especially in the national security domain, many things the government does have to remain secret. Sometimes those things remain secret for years or decades. But they’re not secrets from the U.S. government. The U.S. government owns all those communications, all those facts of its own history. Using a Signal app like this is hiding what’s happening from the government itself. And that is almost certainly not an unintended byproduct but the very reason for the use. These are disappearing communications. They won’t be in the National Archives. Future administrations won’t know what happened. There also won’t be any records to determine whether crimes were committed.
This all goes to the fundamental point Trump has never been able to accept: that the U.S. government is the property of the American people and it persists over time with individual officeholders merely temporary occupants charged with administering an entity they don’t own or possess.
Think this is hyperbole? Remember that when Trump held his notorious meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2019 he confiscated his translator’s notes and ordered him not to divulge anything that had been discussed. Remember that Trump got impeached over an extortion plot recorded in the government record of his phone call with President Zelensky. An intelligence analyst discovered what had happened and decided he needed to report the conduct. These aren’t hypotheticals. They’ve already happened. And he’s even been caught. Which is probably one reason there’s so much use of Signal.
This is clearly routine in the Trump administration. How many of President Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders are happening on these apps? It’s the obvious place for bribes, various kinds of criminal conduct, asking foreign governments to do dirty jobs, maybe against American citizens, that Trump doesn’t dare try himself.
The lack of operational security is bad. But the embedded conspiracy against the government itself is worse.
