The Free Press
On Monday, Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that National Security Adviser Michael Waltz had included him in an encrypted group chat to discuss war plans for striking Houthi targets in Yemen. It didn’t take long for the blame games to begin.
There was plenty of blame to go around—while Waltz invited Goldberg into the chat, it was others, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who Goldberg claims shared classified material in the chat. For one wing of the MAGA coalition, it was Waltz who should go.
The stakes here are not just group chat etiquette. The real problem, for this faction, is that Mike Waltz represents a foreign policy that is insufficiently hostile to the old Beltway consensus about America’s enemies and allies. Hegseth has empowered America Firsters at the Pentagon. Waltz has Jeffrey Goldberg in his list of contacts.
It’s true that Donald Trump said Tuesday that Waltz is a “good man” who “learned his lesson.” And in the Trump era, it can be perilous to be on the wrong side of the MAGA wing that is skeptical of foreign interventions.
For this crowd, Waltz was already on thin ice before the snafu. He was seen as a representative of the old Republican Party, tainted by past military interventions. In this view, the far greater sin was that an anti-Trump journalist was on his speed dial.
Sean Davis, CEO of the Trump-aligned publication The Federalist, said in a post on X he was “a lot less interested in how J.D. Vance is trying to keep the defense bureaucracy aligned with Trump’s foreign policy message and vision, and a lot more concerned about why Mike Waltz is regularly talking to Jeffrey Goldberg, a dead-end neocon war pimp who has been involved with every major foreign policy hoax of the last quarter century.”
Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, struck a similar tone when he said on X that Trump “has frankly never had as acute and relevant (the national security adviser oversees. . . national security) cause as he now has with NSA Waltz.”
Someone “close to the White House” certainly sounded like they were out to get Waltz when they told Politico that “Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot.”
“Can anyone seriously argue that Mike Waltz should not be fired?” asked Breaking Points co-host Saagar Enjeti in a post on X. “Both responsible for a massive security leak and accidentally reveals he’s in regular comms with one of the most prolific neocon journalists in D.C.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Waltz himself said he’d “never met, don’t know, never communicated with” Goldberg. In his piece, Goldberg says he has met Waltz “in the past.” Nonetheless, one need only peruse Goldberg’s magazine since January to notice The Atlantic has not published any foreign policy scoops until Goldberg’s inadvertent one from Monday.
These figures, as well as Vice President J.D. Vance and many other lower-level officials brought in at the White House and Pentagon, are all part of the “restrainer” movement. This crowd believes the Beltway foreign policy consensus has overstretched America’s military and that European allies in particular should invest more in their own national defense instead of riding freely on America’s military.
In this sense, the ire directed at Waltz appears to be a convenient ideological cudgel. From just a national security perspective, the far more concerning breach was committed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who, according to Goldberg, shared specifics about the strikes on Yemen. Here is how Goldberg described that information (which he chose not to include in his story). This was “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” Yikes.
Leaving aside Goldberg’s invitation to the group text, there is a risk in just sharing that information at all on a commercial encrypted app like Signal. “There is a vulnerability if you are using Signal,” Dan Meyer, the former director for whistleblowing and transparency to the Inspector General of the Defense Department, told The Free Press. “The president can decide it’s okay for all of his employees to use Signal. . . . But Signal is open to hacking by foreign intelligence services.”
So why has Hegseth largely avoided the wrath of wider MAGA Land? One reason is that he has all the right enemies. Unlike the confirmation process for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which he sailed through with a 99 to 0 vote in the Senate, Hegseth’s nomination came down to the wire. Details from his divorce and an alleged tryst with a woman who was not his wife were dredged up during his nomination. His lack of experience was derided, and many Democrats in the Senate scoffed at the former soldier’s last job as a host on Fox News. Hegseth, like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI director Kash Patel, became a loyalty test for Republicans: Would they support the president even when the Washington establishment bristled?
For now, the White House is saying the entire matter is a nothingburger. Administration officials have pointed to guidance for government officials released during the Biden administration that allows for the use of messaging apps with end-to-end encryption like Signal. And as far as it goes, it’s true that senior national security officials in the Biden administration did use Signal to communicate with one another.
But one former senior national security official for a Democratic administration told The Free Press that while his colleagues did occasionally use Signal for routine communications, they never used it the way that Goldberg described in The Atlantic. “Some people had Signal on government phones,” this source said. “The primary focus was logistics and coordination when people were out of the office, or communicating with foreign counterparts who were not on our classified system. . . . We would never have a substantive policy discussion on Signal.”
So it raises some uncomfortable questions. What will mid-level officials think about the cumbersome rules of handling classified material when their bosses so casually discuss military plans on a Signal text chain? And what will Russian or Chinese officials conclude about the national security leaders of their most powerful rival? Finally, what does it say that the president’s reaction to the entire affair is to dismiss it as fake news and a tempest in a teapot?
While Signalgate has been grist for an ideological fight within Trump’s coalition, it speaks volumes that it seems the incompetence and carelessness displayed by Trump’s cabinet will, for now, go unpunished.
