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This incident strikes me as kind of a perfect banality.
Its one of the most boring "scandals" of all time. What did we learn?
High level Trump officials use signal instead of, or in addition to regular texts for discussing topics relevant to their job. We already knew they were using something, now we know its signal. Maybe that will change. Maybe it will cause some foia headaches. Overall, big yawn.
Someone in this circle was incompetent, apparently someone on Waltz's staff. Well, not even really incompetent. He/she basically did a fatfinger and gave the boss the wrong number. Yawn, with an asterisk.
Vance is less hawkish than the rest of the inner circle relating to defense. Already public info.
The administration isn't lying in public about thinking Europe is a bunch of weenies. Confirming more public info.
Jeffery Goldberg is a fabulist that exaggerates. Also already public info.
Jeffery Goldberg isn't evil enough to leak military information he has until after the OP is done. Honestly, this is new information. Before this story I would have been close to 50/50 on whether he would jeopardize a strike in the middle east for a story.
The only way this story is really A STORY is if 2 is a lie, and this was an op. That is, the staffer is a turncoat, or there was some FBI/CIA/NSA interference that resulted in Goldberg getting added, or something else. So as it is, the story as reported is quite boring. Everyone acknowledged the conversation was real fairly quickly, its contents are basically uncontroversial, and sometimes downright encouraging (I can't imagine Kamala and Lloyd Austin texting about the actual pros/cons of bombing Houthis in a productive and substantial manner). The security flaw, having been identified can now be rectified with either a more secure app, some additional protocols, etc. In the end, the administration got a little lucky, but the great thing about getting lucky is you dont take a loss, and yet you still get to learn LIKE you got a loss. If you are smart. And I think at least a number of people in the Trump admin are smart enough to coach a high school sports team, which is all the smarts you need.
This is inverse TDS. Leaking the time and details of a military strike to a completely random person is bad! The sheer level of incompetence necessary for nobody to have checked that everyone in the chat was who they thought they were before sending the 'strike in two hours' message is insane! This is the kind of behavior that gets military secrets leaked to enemies. Apparently I hold my discord groupchats to a higher standard of security than freaking Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz do.
The incompetence was swiftly acknowledged. Which is why its not going to be a longrunning story.
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Even if Signal is a secure app, a chat isn't secure unless you know who everyone in the chat is. There were 20 people in the chat if you count Goldberg, and a lot of them were only identified by initials or first names. Frankly, a chat being labelled as "small group" and having 20 people in it should be a yellow flag - 20 isn't a small group as anyone who has been in a ftf meeting with 20 people in the room would understand.
Hegseth posted nonpublic information about future military operations (I am not going to go into the weeds as to whether it was actually classified under the relevant executive orders - it affects neither the actual severity of the fuckup nor any potential criminal liability under the Espionage Act) to a chat without checking who was in the room. Doing that at a bank would get your bonus docked for a material compliance breach, and would probably be a firing offence if you did it twice.
It feels like this story is bigger than it needs to be because Team Trump keeps saying silly things in an attempt to avoid admitting that Waltz and Hegseth did the dumb. The best defence is "Two new political appointees made an OPSEC mistake due to inexperience. Fortunately Jonah Goldberg handled the situation responsibly and no harm was done. Now let's get back to talking about the American people's priorities."
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