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There’s no getting around the fact that Signal-gate was a blunder.
In soccer terms, it was an own goal, a totally unnecessary screw-up that set back the Trump team.
But the team is still winning and the opposition is still in total disarray and fighting among themselves.
Let’s hope lessons have been learned.
It’s hard to believe that, of all the people on planet Earth, it was Jeffrey Goldberg, America’s most rabidly anti-Trump journalist, who could have been “inadvertently” patched into a sensitive Signal group chat of the national security Cabinet discussing sensitive plans for military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen.
But that’s what President Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz is telling us.
He claimed Tuesday he has “never met, don’t know, never communicated with” the Atlantic editor-in-chief.
Of course, swampy Washington quickly unearthed a photo of Waltz standing right in front of Goldberg in the French Embassy in 2021 at an event for French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy that was billed as a “conversation” between Goldberg and Lévy.
Waltz probably meets a lot of swamp-dwellers, since wife Julia Nesheiwat is a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, and he has told Trump it was “one of his people” who added Goldberg to the Signal chat group.
One of the screenshots Goldberg published in The Atlantic shows it was Waltz’s Signal account — tagged as “Admin” that sent him a Signal invite on March 11, and then added him to the “Houthi PC small group” on March 13.
Waltz has told reporters he accepts “full responsibility” for the error and admitted he “built the [Signal] group.”
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham asked the perfect question of Waltz Tuesday: “How did a Trump-hating editor of the Atlantic end up on your Signal chat?”
No conspiracy theorist
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” said Waltz, before suggesting that Goldberg’s number may have somehow appeared in his or a staffer’s contacts list attached to someone else’s name.
“You got somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact, so of course I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else . . . Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical way is something we’re trying to figure out.”
That’s not as crazy as it sounds.
It happened to me last week when I received a call from someone named Mike but it was mislabeled on my phone with the name of a different Mike, causing a moment of confusion.
Syncing errors with Apple contacts have been reported in Apple forums and tech articles for years.
But it doesn’t explain how Goldberg’s number got on Waltz’s (or his staffer’s) phone.
Waltz must have checked the contact list and should know whether the unknown number on the group chat was associated with another name.
That much doesn’t need an Elon Musk forensic deep dive.
But something doesn’t add up, and you can’t blame the Trump administration for being paranoid after all the Deep State ops against the president in his first term.
This smells a lot like the Russia hoax, the Steele Dossier, the phony impeachment, the Dirty 51, etc.
One thing is for sure, Trump won’t sacrifice Waltz to appease the media after the ambush in his first term of Gen. Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser.
The president has learned that you never give an inch to the forces of darkness, because they are insatiable.
They’ll never stop.
So he is standing by Waltz, calling him a “good man [who has] learned a lesson.”
He’s lost their trust
It’s fair to say, however, that Waltz’s colleagues will never trust him again.
He’s embarrassed them all.
It’s because of him that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were sitting ducks in back-to-back congressional hearings this week as hungry Dems took potshots at them.
But Trump is right.
The US mission to attack the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and open the Red Sea shipping lane to restore safety for international cargo has been “unbelievably successful,” he told reporters Wednesday.
That’s the point.
For Democrats to be hyperventilating about operational security and intelligence failures is laughable considering what they allowed without complaint under Joe Biden.
From the Chinese spy balloons that cruised unmolested across the country to the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan that needlessly killed 13 US service members, delivered billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban and emboldened America’s enemies, the Democrats have no moral high ground.
In any case, Goldberg and his fellows in the Resistance media have over-egged the pudding so much, they have destroyed their own credibility.
Here are some of the most egregious beat-ups:
Steve Witkoff: Trump’s Middle East envoy did not participate in the group chat while he was in Russia, as has been claimed.
“I only had with me a secure phone provided by the government for special circumstances when you travel to regions where you do not want your devices compromised,” Witkoff said in response to charges that he had allowed his phone to be compromised.
He only read the Signal chat when he returned to the US.
That line of attack seems to be kaput.
Signal: One of the most secure messaging apps in the world, it uses end-to-end encryption that ensures secrecy, doesn’t store message content on its server and collects no user content.
And as Ratcliffe and Gabbard pointed out in their testimony, it comes “pre-installed on government devices,” as was the case in the Biden administration.
Gabbard said the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in December advised “highly targeted individuals” in the government to protect themselves using Signal for conversations.
But Signal is not perfect, as the current mess reveals. “It could be a defective platform,” says Trump.
A line not to cross
Classified information: Waltz at one point told other chat members to look at information on the “high side,” a classified server, indicating a line the Signal conversation should not cross.
That’s not to say that what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote to his colleagues about imminent timings of drone attacks didn’t qualify as classified information, but it’s not the huge deal Goldberg claimed.
No sources, methods or locations.
Goldberg’s ethics: Anyone who buys Goldberg’s narcissistic self-assessment that he behaved ethically and patriotically is deluded.
It’s one thing for him to watch the group chat to figure out what was happening but he lurked around for days, knowing he wasn’t supposed to be listening in.
He still would have had a story if he had done the ethical thing and identified himself.
If I, or any other journalist at this newspaper, were caught doing the same to the Biden administration, praise is the last thing that would have been heaped on us.
In the end, the Trump team has lost some bark but as the president knows better than anyone, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.