Rep. Moulton (D-MA) on if Defense Secretary Hegseth was Incompetent or Drunk
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Was Hegseth Drunk?
Hat tip to https://drudgereport.com
Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal
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
Mediaite: Trump Just Handed His Biggest Enemy in Media a Slam Dunk
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.
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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.
‘Tip of the iceberg’: Can Trump’s National Security adviser survive Signal scandal?
Waltz denies texting tie to Jeffrey Goldberg
Now they are trying to lie their way out of it. Rots of ruck with that!
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, wrote that Waltz had connected with him earlier this month on Signal, a commercial messaging app, before being added to a group of national security officials who were convening electronically to discuss imminent strikes on the Houthis, a Yemen-based military movement.
While Goldberg said he had met Waltz in the past, the Trump adviser from Florida denied knowing Goldberg in comments delivered Tuesday at a White House meeting. Waltz said he “never met, don’t know,” and “never communicated with” the journalist, who broke the explosive story of Trump officials communicating about military plans on a non-secure app.
“We are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” Waltz said.
President Donald Trump expressed confidence in Waltz, calling him a good man who “learned a lesson,” and attacked Goldberg as a “sleazebag” who “has made up a lot of stories.”
Meanwhile back at the ranch where everyone is sober:
But a spokesman for the National Security Council already validated the authenticity of the text chain Goldberg published, which included 18 individuals, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and an unnamed active U.S. intelligence officer.
The messages included intelligence operations, a policy debate around the timing of the strikes against the Houthis and operational details, including information on targets, weapons and the sequencing of attacks.
Washington Post: Trump’s shocking military plan leak epitomizes a sloppy operation
The second Trump administration has clearly made a decision to move fast and break things. Largely gone are the establishment Republican figures and steady hands that sometimes resisted President Donald Trump during his first term. In their place are a bunch of people with less subject-matter and governmental experience but with the zeal of MAGA true believers, eager to implement Trump’s complete governmental overhaul and to bust through the traditional guardrails in the process.
The result is a very — and increasingly — sloppy first two months, by any objective measure.
The big headline Monday was that top Trump national security officials shared sensitive military plans for impending strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels with the editor in chief of the Atlantic. The White House confirmed to The Washington Post that the editor was inadvertently included in the messages.
The editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added to the string of messages on Signal, an open-source encrypted messaging service. The group included the names of prominent administration figures, such as national security adviser Michael Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance, all strategizing about the impending attacks.
The messages were sent before the strikes began last weekend and previewed almost precisely when they ultimately took place.
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Trump’s shocking military plan leak epitomizes a sloppy operation
New York Times: I Don’t Know How Pete Hegseth Can Look Service Members In the Eyes
I don’t know how Pete Hegseth can look at service members in the eyes. He’s just blown his credibility as a military leader.
On Monday, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published one of the most extraordinary stories I’ve ever read. Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, apparently inadvertently invited Goldberg to join a Signal group chat (Signal is an encrypted messaging app) that seemed to include several senior Trump officials, including Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.
A National Security Council spokesman told The Atlantic that the chat “appears to be authentic.”
No one apparently noticed Goldberg’s presence, and he had a front-row seat as they debated Trump’s decision to attack the Houthi rebels, an Iran-backed militia that had been firing on civilian shipping in the Red Sea.
Then, at 11:44 a.m. on March 15, the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” sent a message that contained “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying and attack sequencing.”
This would be a stunning breach of security. I’m a former Army JAG officer (an Army lawyer). I’ve helped investigate numerous alleged spillages of classified information, and I’ve never even heard of anything this egregious — a secretary of defense intentionally using a civilian messaging app to share sensitive war plans, without even apparently noticing a journalist was in the chat.
Opinion | I Don’t Know How Pete Hegseth Can Look Service Members In the Eyes – The New York Times
The Hill: House Republican on war plans chat: ‘There’s no doubt that Russia and China saw this stuff’
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said there’s “no doubt” that Russia and China were monitoring the U.S. officials’ devices used for a war plan text chat.
“I will guarantee you, 99.99 percent with confidence, Russia and China are monitoring those two phones,” Bacon told CNN’s Manu Raju. “So I just think it’s a security violation, and there’s no doubt that Russia and China saw this stuff within hours of the actual attacks on Yemen or the Houthis.”
National security adviser Mike Waltz reportedly invited The Atlantic’s top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, into the Signal group, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared secret war plans.
Bacon, a former Air Force brigadier general and a member of the House Armed Services committee, said he always was concerned about Hegseth, an Army veteran who was a longtime Fox News host.
Bacon called the group chat, which also included Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President Vance, among others, a “gross error.”
“They intentionally put highly classified information on an unclassified device,” he told CNN. “I would have lost my security clearance in the Air Force for this and for a lot less.”
House Republican on war plans chat: ‘There’s no doubt that Russia and China saw this stuff’
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said there’s “no doubt” that Russia and China were monitoring the U.S. officials’ devices used for a war plan text chat. “I will guarantee you, 99.99 percent with conf…
Don Bacon says Russia, China likely saw war plans group chat
The Telegraph: Kremlin targeting app at heart of White House group chat leaks
Cyber attackers linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency had sought to gain access to Signal accounts
Russian military hackers have targeted the messaging app at the centre of the White House group chat fiasco, raising further fears about the security of US secret communications.
Researchers at Google found cyber attackers linked to the Kremlin’s military intelligence agency had sought to gain access to Signal accounts in Ukraine and were likely to use the techniques on other targets to snoop on conversations.
On Monday it emerged that members of Donald Trump’s cabinet including JD Vance, the vice president, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, had used Signal to discuss secret US military plans.
It emerged after Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat in which they discussed plans to bomb Yemen and disclosed classified material.
Kremlin targeting app at heart of White House group chat leaks
Cyber attackers linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency had sought to gain access to Signal accounts
Kremlin targeting Signal app at heart of White House group chat leaks
The Atlantic: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.
I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.
This is going to require some explaining.
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