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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   31950 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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The whole thing is really bizarre. Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?

I don't believe the theories about it being deliberate and some manipulative exercise against friendly and hostile foreign governments. Hegseth purportedly posted operational details which isn't 'no classified information was discussed'. It was specific details about a military operation before it occurred. And then in the Senate Intelligence hearing they glossed over things with the CIA Director saying Signal is an approved app for comms like this.

If the whole thing was some sort of PsyOp, why did Hegseth post those details? Did it never happen and the journalist is complicit? Isn't there an easier way to PsyOp without making the administration look incompetent?

I think its just what it looks like. A big stuff up.

Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?

If you're going to add a random person to a chat, it's going to be a random person in your contacts list. And people in politics talk to journalists a lot. Odds seem pretty high imo!

Yeah, it looks like Waltz's (now deleted) Venmo account was full of journalists including from MSNBC and CNN.

He might not necessarily have been previously leaking info to Goldberg. Maybe Goldberg previously contacted him asking for comment and was saved as a standard phone contact that way. Maybe someone else sent him a dodgy contact card which he saved into his phone. This contact was then imported into Signal and then he accidentally added it to the group chat. He made a comment about contacts 'getting sucked in' in a recent interview.

I think Waltz is basically lying through his teeth right now for damage control, so I don't think we're going to get a straight story from him.

Goldberg claims details about a military operation were disclosed. However the evidence he provided doesn’t to date confirm that. Goldberg also has a history of lying.

That is, it isn’t clear what has it has not been shared.

The evidence he provided doesn’t to date confirm that.

He has now provided evidence.

And it seems like Goldberg overstated what he was given but perhaps Trump’s team understated.

So it looks like the administration straight up lied. I don't know why they would considering Goldberg had the receipts. Are they trying to use some weasel reasoning of what is and is not 'classified'?

Are they trying to use some weasel reasoning of what is and is not 'classified'?

Yes, but it's valid weaseling.

This tweet is doing the rounds that says advanced warning that the US will attack is automatically classified as Top Secret. The only way I can square the weaseling is if I squint and say SecDef has the ability to declassify any DoD classified information, which he presumably did by posting it in the chat.

The CIA director alluded to this argument in his Senate Intelligence answers today.

That's a policy document saying how things SHOULD be classified. It is not binding on the SECDEF himself, as the Original Classification Authority.

Note that Waltz's assessment of European (lack of) capabilities is also covered there, though without any supporting material it's only Confidential. However, he is also an Original Classification Authority.

The whole thing is really bizarre. Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?

The obvious answer is that Waltz was already leaking speaking off the record to JG using Signal prior to this incident.

Glenn Greenwald agrees with you.

I've struggled with this because of Goldberg's hostility to the administration, but nothing else fits unless someone else had access to his phone. He already denied that a staffer of his changed the contact.

Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?

Not low. Vance's phone will be full with high profile beltway people. As will everyone else's. A nice chunk of them are journalists.

Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor added everyone to the group and he used his phone's contacts to do so. He denies having ever met or having the contact on his phone of the journalist in question.

In this interview he says the the contact he had in his phone was for someone else that should have been in the group. But that contact's name was somehow attached to the journalist's number instead. The interviewer asks if it was a rogue staffer who substituted the number, but Waltz denied it. He says there is an investigation underway with attached technical experts trying to determine how the wrong number was assigned to the legitimate persons name in his phone.

It would make sense that a motivated person would try to substitute a hostile journalist's number in this way, but how that happened is still up in the air. Still, some of the blatant smearing of the journalist in question by Waltz in this interview (and Hegseth when interviewed earlier today) in some post-hoc Poisoning the Well makes it more difficult to take everything Waltz is saying at face value.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has been suggested as the intended person. As for how the number got into his phone... I'm going to guess he just fucked up and put in the wrong J.G. from some other list at some point.

Mike Walz

Note: Waltz (Michael) ≠ Walz (Timothy)

Thanks, fixed.

Yeah, this is the most likely explanation. They likely just assumed that “JG” was either another JG or was supposed to be there for another reason and that somebody else was handling opsec / the group chat.

American trade representative Jameison Greer is the name I've seen thrown around for who they might have thought it was. That might still be too charitable - the simplest explanation is that many people just don't really look all that closely at who else is on a group chat. You would kind of hope that some measure of care would be taken when we're talking about sensitive information, but people just get used to what they're doing and don't think about it much.

Maybe they thought it was a lieutenant junior grade lmao

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