Tuesday, March 25, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 30
by Chris Brennan
Politicians installed by President Donald Trump in government agencies with a clear mandate to disrupt them to the point of irreparable damage have been laser-focused for weeks on the real bad guys – leakers!
So imagine how uncomfortable it must be for Trump to learn that the most notorious leak in his first nine weeks back in the White House came from … politicians installed by Trump to disrupt and damage government agencies.
How do they square this circle? Leaking is bad! Also, we’re a bunch of leakers.
The leak that astonished Washington, D.C., landed Monday when Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, published a story about how he had somehow been added to a group chat on the phone app Signal, where top Trump administration members first revealed and later reveled in the U.S. airstrikes 10 days ago on Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen for harassing ships in the Red Sea.
From Goldberg’s account, it seems National Security Adviser Mike Waltz added him to a Signal chat, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared what must have been highly classified military plans with accounts identified in the app as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard and Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles.
Even for a Trump administration, this level of ineptitude is enormous. Trump, asked about the fiasco Monday, played dumb – convincingly – while instinctively attacking the news media for telling the truth.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said Monday. “I’m not a big fan on the Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business.”
Trump administration has problem living up to any standards
You may have noticed that the Democratic Party in America has been overmatched at every turn in resisting Trump’s efforts to dismember the government permanently. These are the moments where the party needs to strike fast.
Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, was hosting a media conference call Monday afternoon about protecting Social Security from Republican cuts when he was asked about The Atlantic story.
Martin said the fiasco put American lives in danger and used it to suggest that Trump and his Republican allies can’t be trusted with anything ‒ not Social Security, not national security, not the Internal Revenue Service. Nothing.
“This is a clown show, a bunch of folks who wouldn’t know how to operate a business, much less a government,” Martin said. “It’s unprecedented. And, frankly, Pete Hegseth should be fired.”
One problem there: The Trump administration would never live up to the standards it sets for others. They love law and order while pardoning people who attack cops. They promise to lower prices while lobbing tariffs that increase costs. They vow to protect Social Security while squeezing the agency to ensure that it becomes harder for American taxpayers to receive their benefits.
Don’t expect any politician, from Trump on down, to feel any significant heat for including a journalist in a chat to discuss secret war plans on a publicly available app that helpfully can be set up to auto-delete messages that, by federal law, should be preserved.
Trump attacks journalists who report factually
The real bad guys, to all in Trump’s camp, are journalists who accurately report the news.
Consider how Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Friday reacted to The New York Times reporting that Elon Musk, Trump’s unelected co-president, was set to receive a Defense Department briefing on America’s potential war plans with China.
Blanche, who was Trump’s personal attorney when the current president was convicted on 34 felony counts in a New York criminal case, announced that the Department of Justice “is opening a criminal investigation relating to the selective leak of inaccurate, but nevertheless, classified information.”
That’s a little too cute, trying to have it both ways. The information was inaccurate! But also classified!
Pick a lane, Todd.
Any consequences for mishandling classified information? Probably not.
Gabbard, earlier this month, also warned on social media that she would be “aggressively pursuing recent leakers from within the Intelligence Community and will hold them accountable.”
She denounced leaks as “politically motivated,” designed to undermine national security and the trust of the American people. Then, she participated in a Signal chat where sensitive war plans were shared in real time with a journalist.
As Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic, his participation in the channel was in the open, apparent if anyone was paying attention.
Trump’s top national security team was not paying attention. Defense and intelligence officials were dallying about details and then congratulating each other after the airstrikes were underway. All with a journalist tuned in, amazed to be part of it all.
In a rational government, someone would pay a price here. Some politician seized in a moment of reckless incompetence by issuing a statement about looking forward to spending more time with their family.
That’s not what we have here anymore. Trump and the buffoons who blundered him into this embarrassment will attack journalists for accurately describing their debacle. So the next time Trump or someone on his team tells you how terrible leakers are, remember that they are describing themselves.
Author is a USA TODAY columnist
