Tag Archives: Jeffrey Goldberg

The Mirror: US ‘won’t bother defending Europe from Russia’, leaked Pentagon memo says

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A confidential Pentagon document suggests the United States may not come to Europe’s aid in the event of a Russian attack. The leaked internal memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is said to prioritise deterring China’s ambitions over Taiwan and bolstering defense measures on U.S. soil.

According to The Washington Post, parts of the memo are strikingly similar to a publication by a conservative think tank involved with Project 2025, with sections mirroring it word for word.

The memo outlines Hegseth’s stance that America is unlikely to offer significant support to Europe against Russian aggression. It highlights an expectation for NATO allies to assume the primary role in defending their territory.

The United States, the guidance suggests, will provide nuclear deterrence against Russia but will only commit forces that are not essential for homeland security or missions related to China.

US ‘won’t bother defending Europe from Russia’, leaked Pentagon memo says
The leaked memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instead focuses on deterring China’s seizure of Taiwan and shoring up homeland defense

US ‘won’t bother defending Europe from Russia’, leaked Pentagon memo says

Irish Star: True meaning behind [Bimbo #1] Karoline Leavitt’s nickname as White House press secretary clashes with reporters

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[Bimbo #1] Karoline Leavitt has been living up to a new nickname she was given following her first White House press briefing as she’s accused of making a disgraceful attempt to spin the Trump administration’s Signal group chat scandal.

The White House press secretary – who recently showed off what a day in her life looks like – was first dubbed the “spinmeister” by CNN back in January as she was accused of spinning information about a pause on federal grants and loans when she said payments for Social Security, Medicare and food stamps would not be affected but didn’t say what would happen to nonprofit programs like Meals on Wheels.

“It’s a classic spinmeister tactic saying I answered that when you haven’t answered it and apparently can’t answer it right away,” CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale said.

But the 27-year-old’s latest spin attempt has backfired as she now appears to have made a spectacular U-turn after critics accused her of lying. After The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal messaging app group in which top government officials discussed plans for strikes in Yemen, Leavitt attempted to change the narrative.

During a fiery White House briefing on Wednesday the press secretary told reporters: “If this story proves anything, it proves that Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate, and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well.”

She called Goldberg’s piece a “sensationalized story from the failing Atlantic magazine” while attempting to smear the reporter and doubling down on claims that no classified information was leaked.

Leavitt snapped at CNN’s Kaitlin Collins when asked about the ongoing scandal before abruptly cutting the volatile press conference short.

Head in the sand often?

True meaning behind Karoline Leavitt’s nickname as White House press secretary clashes with reporters

True meaning behind Karoline Leavitt’s nickname as White House press secretary clashes with reporters

Mediaite: Fox News Panel Goes Off the Rails After Pod Save America Host Insults Network and Accuses Pete Hegseth of Drunkenly Sharing Classified Info

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America doesn’t have a DEI problem right now. We have a competency problem because we have a Fox News Weekend anchor named Pete Hegseth, who, you tell me, may or may not have been tipsy at the time he was sending around this classified information, breaking all the rules, putting at risk service members, and making terrible decisions while Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, is adding journalists to the group chat.

Fox News Panel Goes Off the Rails After Pod Save America Host Insults Network and Accuses Pete Hegseth of Drunkenly Sharing Classified Info

Fox News Panel Goes Off the Rails After Pod Save America Host Insults Network and Accuses Pete Hegseth of Drunkenly Sharing Classified Info

CNN: Concerns about Hegseth’s judgment come roaring back after group chat scandal

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“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Hegseth told reporters Tuesday.

By Wednesday, however, other defense officials were increasingly skeptical of that, especially after The Atlantic magazine revealed the details that Hegseth shared in the Signal chat about the pending strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen, including the timing and types of aircraft.

“It is safe to say that anybody in uniform would be court-martialed for this,” a defense official told CNN. “My most junior analysts know not to do this.”

…

But former national security and intelligence officials say it’s Hegseth who looks particularly bad given the level of detail he shared.

“The egregious actor here is Hegseth,” said one former senior intelligence official. “He’s in the bullseye now because he puts all this out on a Signal chat.”

Interviews with multiple current and former national security officials this week, including career military and civilian officials, reflect growing concerns about Hegseth’s leadership at the Pentagon.

…

Many of his orders are verbal and based on gut instinct rather than a deliberative, multi-layered process, people familiar with his methods said.

“He’s a TV personality,” one of the sources said. “[A general officer] makes a recommendation, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ [Former Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin would never be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ 

…

Several DoD officials told CNN that Hegseth seems more preoccupied with appearances than with substance—wanting to appear more “lethal” than his predecessor and pulling resources from elsewhere in DoD to achieve that image.

….

“Of all the things they could be doing, the places they’re putting their focuses on first are really things that just don’t matter … This was literally a waste of our time,” a defense official told CNN of the content purge. “This does absolutely nothing to make us stronger, more lethal, better prepared.”

And Hegseth is outranked and outclassed by his predecessors:

Hegseth ultimately rose to the rank of Major before leaving the National Guard in 2021, and has the least experience of any Senate-confirmed defense secretary in recent history.

His immediate predecessor Austin, a four-star general, served for 41 years and commanded US Central Command; former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper served as the Secretary of the Army before being confirmed as SecDef; and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, also a 40-year veteran and four-star general, commanded US Central Command as well before being confirmed as Trump’s first secretary of defense.

Concerns about Hegseth’s judgment come roaring back after group chat scandal

Concerns about Hegseth’s judgment come roaring back after group chat scandal

NBC News: A DHS staffer faces serious punishment for accidentally adding a reporter to a group email

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The episode, which hasn’t been previously reported, raises questions about unequal punishment for inadvertent leakers in the Trump administration.

The bigwigs run interference for one another. The little people get the shaft.

It’s what happened to a longtime Department of Homeland Security employee who told colleagues she inadvertently sent unclassified details of an upcoming Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation to a journalist in late January, according to former ICE chief of staff Jason Houser, one former DHS official and one current DHS official. (The two officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they do not want to endanger their current or future career opportunities.)

But unlike Waltz and Hegseth, who both remain in their jobs, the career DHS employee was put on administrative leave and told late last week that the agency intends to revoke her security clearance, the officials said.  

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has largely rallied around Waltz and Hegseth, with Trump on Wednesday calling it “all a witch hunt.” 

A DHS staffer faces serious punishment for accidentally adding a reporter to a group email
The episode, which hasn’t been previously reported, raises questions about unequal punishment for inadvertent leakers in the Trump administration.

A DHS staffer faces serious punishment for accidentally adding a reporter to a group email

The Hill: GOP lawmakers turn up the pressure on Hegseth

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is under close scrutiny as Republican lawmakers criticize his handling of sensitive military information in a group chat with other administration officials that inadvertently included a journalist.

Republican lawmakers have stopped short of calling on Hegseth to resign, but they’re warning that his decision to share sensitive details about a pending military strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen over Signal, a commercial app, is a clear “strike” against him.

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And they’re wondering about Hegseth’s response to reporters’ questions, specifically his adamant denial that “nobody’s texting war plans” after a National Security Council spokesperson had confirmed the chat group’s reported texts appeared to be “authentic.”

“The worst part of it is Hegseth saying himself, ‘This didn’t really happen.’ Why don’t you just admit it?” one Republican senator remarked.

…

And while White House press secretary [Bimbo #1] Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday sought to draw a distinction between “war plans” and “attack plans” in criticizing The Atlantic’s reporting …  

GOP lawmakers turn up the pressure on Pete Hegseth

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

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The administration has downplayed the importance of the text messages inadvertently sent to The Atlantic’s editor in chief.

So, about that Signal chat.

On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

So if it wasn’t classified, and if the Trump administration is going to openly insult them and call them liars …

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.

And here it is:

Houthi PC small group
Idiots used an unsecured public messaging platform to plan an attack on Houthi rebels. The discussion group was named “Houthi PC small group”. If these guys are Krasnov’s best and brightest, I’d hate to see their worst & dumbest.

Source:

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

Mediaite: Trump Just Handed His Biggest Enemy in Media a Slam Dunk

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LOL! After all that whining about Hillary Clinton’s email server!

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

President Donald Trump insisted that information leaked to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was not classified multiple times during a White House press availability Tuesday afternoon. But his defiant tone may have just backed his administration into a corner of litigious federal investigations, potentially giving one of his most prominent and influential critics a major win.

…

Pro-Trump media figures have since bent over backwards to try to defend the massive security breach, which could potentially involve crimes, given the law that Trump enacted during his first administration in response to Hillary Clinton’s email server controversy.

Trump Just Handed His Biggest Enemy in Media a Slam Dunk
President Trump insisted that information leaked to Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg multiple times during a White House press availability Tuesday.

Trump Claims Signal Leak Not Classified Could Be Criminal

UK Daily Mail: Trump team sparks fury with ‘sickening’ choice of emojis while describing their war plans in leaked Signal chat

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The use of emojis in a leaked Trump administration group chat discussing strikes on Houthi targets has sparked outrage, with accusations that officials made light of the sensitive topics being discussed.

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, revealed on Monday that Trump’s national security advisor Michael Waltz had – seemingly inadvertently – added him to a group chat called ‘Houthi PC small group’.

The chat appears to have served as a virtual war room for some of the President’s top team, including Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard and Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Goldberg said that Hegseth shared the war plan with the group at 11.44am eastern time on Saturday March 15, two hours before the bombs began dropping on Yemen.

As news broke of the strikes, the journalist checked the group chat where he found a flurry of emojis and congratulations flooding the text chain.

Waltz updated the group at 1.48pm, saying the operation had been an ‘amazing job’ before sending three emojis a few minutes later – a fist, an American flag, and fire.

…

Trump team sparks fury with ‘sickening’ choice of emojis in war chat
As news broke of the strikes on Yemen, the journalist checked the group chat where he found a flurry of emojis and congratulations flooding the text chain.

Trump team sparks fury with ‘sickening’ choice of emojis while describing their war plans in leaked Signal chat | Daily Mail Online

New York Times: Inside Pete Hegseth’s Rocky First Months at the Pentagon

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The disclosure of battle plans on a chat app created a new predicament for the defense secretary.

There’s nothing that can’t be cured by few stiff drinks:

Even before he disclosed secret battle plans for Yemen in a group chat, information that could have endangered American fighter pilots, it had been a rocky two months for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Mr. Hegseth, a former National Guard infantryman and Fox News weekend host, started his job at the Pentagon determined to out-Trump President Trump, Defense Department officials and aides said.

The president is skeptical about the value of NATO and European alliances, so the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth considered plans in which the United States would give up its command role overseeing NATO troops. After Mr. Trump issued executive orders targeting transgender people, Mr. Hegseth ordered a ban on transgender troops.

Mr. Trump has embraced Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla. The Pentagon planned a sensitive briefing to give Mr. Musk a firsthand look at how the military would fight a war with China, a potentially valuable step for any businessman with interests there.

Inside Pete Hegseth’s Rocky First Months at the Pentagon – The New York Times