Yesterday, I wrote about how excited I was to read the Signal chat about the US military's attack on the Houthis from our Administration's top officials. I wanted to lead with that to assure anyone who reads this post that I am completely supportive of the individuals in this Administration and express my admiration for their committment to "Make America Great Again." Unfortunately, it's now time to have a deeper conversation about what exactly happened, because this was a colossal screw up and it absolutely cannot be allowed to happen again. The saving grace in all of this is that The Atlantic Magazine decided not to release this data prior to the attack in order to embarrass the Trump Administration by forcing them to call off the attack or put our pilots in greater danger. Donald Trump and the administration have spent a lot of time targeting The Atlantic and the editor involved, and normally I would agree that it is an insult to the journalism industry to call them journalists. However, by not releasing the chats sooner and tipping off the Houthis, they provided a service (however small) to this country and they made a very responsible decision; which deserves our respect.

Mike Waltz Cannot Be Trusted by the Trump Administration

Let's break this down chronologically. First and foremost, the Administration has been quick to admit that Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist involved and an editor for The Atlantic never should have been added to that group chat on Signal. That is certainly true, but what's alarming to me is that Jeffery Goldberg never should have been in a contact list that COULD be added to that chat. Signal is both an app that can be used on your phone and a program that can be used on your computer. However, to my knowledge, government officials using Signal are not permitted to use it on their telephones because these devices can be too easily hijacked by hackers, especially from foreign governments. There's also the risk that you lose your phone and exploits a way to gain access to the data therein. Although Signal uses End-to-End Encryption to protect the data, that security measure fails as soon as you get access to the "end" doing the encrypting. So, even if Mike Waltz's staffer had put Jeffery Goldberg in his phone, he should not have had Signal installed on his phone. So, either Mike Waltz was using Signal on an unprotected and unauthorized device, or he added Jeffery Goldberg to his Signal contact list on whatever approved government PC he was using. I don't understand why he would do this unless he intended to leak information about the Trump Administration to The Atlantic.

Mike Waltz is not a MAGA Republican, he's a "neoconservative" that Trump added to his Administration in order to appease that wing of the Republican Party in Congress. This second Trump Administration has had relatively few leaks compared to the first months of the first Trump Administration, and that's because they've put a great deal of emphasis on only allowing trusted people into the Administration; much to the ire of Democrats. Mike Waltz was an exception made to that rule, and it seems President Trump has already paid a price for it with this screw up getting spread around news headlines like wildfire. If Mike Waltz was part of Trump's inner circle of MAGA people, I think he would have been forcibly retired and possibly being investigated by Pam Bondi. Because his appointment was meant to be an olive branch, though; Waltz is being kept on at least a little longer. However, I imagine his inclusion in top level meetings is going to be extremely limited from now until he resigns... and I do expect Mike Waltz to resign before the end of the term in January 2029. He's only around now because getting rid of him so quickly would only enrage the neocon wing of the Republican Party in Congress; which Trump needs to pass budget reforms to the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigations. While Democrats have been getting fraudulent kickbacks from fraud happening in DHS and USAID for a long time, I would not be shocked to learn that some Republicans in Congress have been getting similar kickbacks from wasteful and fraudulent Defense Contracts. There's a reason DOGE started where it did, and President Trump is going to need all the help he can get to pass these reforms when the time comes.

What I think happened was that Mike Waltz was in communication with Jeffery Goldberg as an anonymous source for The Atlantic. Waltz did accidently add Jeffery Goldberg to this chat. Once they realized it, they knew it was only a matter of time before someone else would question whose phone number was in this chat group. Waltz and Goldberg orchestrated how it would come out. Goldberg would delay in releasing the entire chat until it was no longer sensitive and Waltz would slam Goldberg and The Atlantic to try and keep his job in the White House so he could continue to be an anonymous source for the magazine. However, Waltz is going to be under a TON of scrutiny now from everyone monitoring communication in the White House, so I'm not entirely sure how valuable of a source Mike Waltz is going to be for anyone after he essentially sent out a burn notice on himself.

This Data WAS Classified

Second, the Trump Administration has said repeatedly that there was nothing classified in these messages. That is almost certainly a lie. In particular, I'm referencing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's message below:

TEAM UPDATE:

TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/ CENTCOM we are GO for mission launch.

1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)

1345: "Trigger Based" F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME) - also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)

1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)

1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier "Trigger Based" targets)

1536: F-18s 2nd Strike Starts - also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.

MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)

We are currently clean on OPSEC

Godspeed to our Warriors.

Interestingly, after this message, Mike Waltz changed the chat rules to that the conversation would disappear after 4 weeks instead of just 1 week.

That message alone should have been classified. Although this does not constitute "war plans" as The Atlantic and other leftist media outlets have alleged, it did contain a timeline for a pending attack. If The Atlantic didn't treat this responsibly, the targets could have fled and gone into hiding, damage could have been minimized, and a defense might have been organized that may have stood a chance of possibly downing one of the F-18s (although I'm skeptical that Iran has given the Houthis this capability). So, even though specific targets were not mentioned, if the Houthis had this information 20 minutes after Pete Hegseth sent the message, it could have foiled the entire mission. It absolutely rises to the criteria of classified information.

The battle damage assessment offered by Waltz was vague enough that it could be argued that it didn't meet the threshold to classify it. However, just speaking from my own experience in the Intelligence Community, battle damage assessments, no matter how vague, are always classified. Obviously, the danger posed by this information is significantly less than the danger posed by Secretary Hegseth's time table of the attack. But it still should have been regarded as classified.

Is Signal Meant For This?

So, years ago, George W. Bush got mocked by the same leftist media that defended Joe Biden's senile nonsense when Bush said "the internets." It became the latest "Bush-ism" that was meant to illustrate how foolish President George W. Bush was. Here's the thing about that though:

There ARE multiple Internets.

The intelligence community actually maintains multiple internets at different classification levels. For example, SIPRNet is used for data classified as SECRET. JWICS is used for TOP SECRET data. (Because I'm still paranoid about this stuff 17 years later, here's a source just to cover my butt).

Now, it's been reported that when this Administration came in, they were briefed on how to use Signal for encrypted communications. Now, because Jeffery Goldberg was added to this chat, I have to assume that Signal here is installed on normal, unclassified computers. What's strange about this to me is that, if Signal is not supposed to be used on their phones and they were all using their normal, unclassified computers... why was this chat not happening on the NIPRNet (used for sensitive but non-classified information like diplomatic cables and chats like this one minus the aforementioned time table)?

In the the early 2010s, the Department of Defense spent a ton of effort and money (billions of dollars) trying to bolster the NIPRNet's network security and ensure that the only ones with access to the network were approved users. As far as I'm aware, the NIPRNet is still in use and SHOULD have been used for this chat.

Signal is a very awesome tool for encrypted messaging. The NIPRNet should have a tool like Signal with End to End Encryption if it doesn't already. However, even if there isn't a similar feature on the NIPRNet, that is not an excuse to use Signal on an unsecure network to pass along sensitive data like this. Even if there is the best possible encryption in use, your data is only as secure as the device with the encryption key: in this case their personal computers. If it's connected to the normal Internet, it's vulnerable to the elite hacker corps in China and (increasingly) Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Thankfully, nothing terrible happened this time. However, attack time tables and their summaries need to be communicated exclusively on the SIRPNet or JWICS as appropriate based on their classification level. Signal is good, but it's not nearly good enough to rest our National Security and the lives of our troops on.

Conclusion

I'm thankful to The Atlantic and Jeffery Goldberg for not sharing this data sooner. It would have brought a lot of heat on themselves, but they would have been protected in court by the First Amendment. Yet, they could have given the Trump administration a REAL black eye by publishing their attack plans and forcing them to call off the attack on the Houthis while simultaneously causing all the damage they're causing now. They did the Trump Administration a favor by waiting to release this story and the entire transcript.

The fact of the matter is that this should never have happened. Between Mike Waltz being a suspected leaker, foolishly adding Jeffery Goldberg to this chat, and Secretary Hegseth sharing classified data on an unsecure network, it's obvious that there are several major problems that have been exposed in this story.

Yet, we should be thankful that nothing bad came of this and confident that the Trump Administration is absolutely not going to let this happen again.

Here's that chat again...

In case you missed it in my previous post, here's the entire chat recorded by Mike Waltz.