This story has been officially designated an Ethics Train Wreck, and I may have to post further on it yet. Once again, we are at the infuriating point where it is impossible to get an un-spun, un-distorted, straightforward explanation of what the issues are, with most conservative news sources downplaying the episode and most Axis sources gleefully “pouncing.” Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has hardly been candid, with the White House Paid Liar being particularly egregious in that respect.
The Humble Talent Comment of the Day that follows is the first of two I will post today. HT has been on fire: these is his observations regarding the post, “Enough Trivia and Silly Stuff: This Is Incompetence That Can’t Be Ignored”:
***
While I generally agree with the flow of the commentariat here, I think there is a massive difference between what Hillary Clinton did, and what Pete Hegseth did, and that progressives are ethically estopped from being smug about this. I’ve shifted even more on this since the hearing yesterday.
First off, I think it’s helpful to articulate what people actually did:
Hillary Clinton set up a private email server in places she had control over, probably in an attempt to foil FOIA and keep much of her Email activity out of the secured channels so they couldn’t be scrutinized. She not only did this deliberately, but she paid money to do it. When it came to light that this was a thing, instead of handing over the server to the investigating agencies, her lawyers turned over what they deemed pertinent and ran data-destroying software on the rest. It was later found out, through cross referencing with people inside the normal classification chain and through the FBI looking at the laptop of Anthony Weiner, that not only had Hillary not handed everything over, but that some of the material was actually marked classified at the time she distributed it.
Pete Hegseth discussed troop movements in a Signal Channel that someone else had invited someone who shouldn’t have been in it into.
While I can’t ignore the incompetence, there is a difference in magnitude, scope and intention here. Pete made a mistake that could have gotten people killed. Hillary communicated in a way that could have gotten people killed, knowingly.
Hillary’s main talking point was that nothing was marked classified as she was sending it. Not only was that not true and some was, but it was a ridiculous thing to say, by stepping outside of the normal systems, there was never an opportunity for the classification authorities to mark them, there was no classification fairy hovering over her shoulder, stamping documents in real time. By her logic, she could have emailed troop movements directly to the enemy HQ and it wouldn’t have been a classification breach because the email wasn’t marked.
Signal is an accepted form of communication. Not necessarily for classified information, but apparently a lot of people in a lot of agencies get work phones with signal pre-loaded on them. And recognizing that this is an incredibly technical distinction: The people who are the authorities on what would be classified were in that Signal group, while that information obviously shouldn’t have been communicated to a reporter, I doubt very much that the classification authorities would deem the information to be classified.
There is no vector from which a Hillary supporter has a leg to stand on here. There is no datapoint that can be articulated where Hillary’s actions were not objectively worse. While Republicans can have conversations on what should happen from here, and we should probably be interested in getting something done here… Anyone that ever carried water for Hillary should recognize that in already having defended worse, they should probably shut the fuck up now.
Ethics Alarms 
Good comment, HT. The Trump Deranged among my Facebook friends are sharing Mrs. Clinton’s “But my emails…” message as if no one were complaining about Hegseth’s people as opposed to her mishandling of information.
Yeah… I’m not saying this was good…. But Hillary was obviously worse, by every conceivable metric, and all these goblins mewling about accountability were in full spin mode less than a decade ago. I think we need to have a conversation…. Just not with them.
Great treatment of the two situations, HT. Thanks.
I posted a reminderr about Hilary’s egregious, yet un punished, action. The gist of the replies was “Well that was ten years ago, what difference does it make!”
I am still unclear with what the real problem with Signal is.
When someone intentionally includes a reporter like this, convince me that this was not intentional on the part of the administration or attempted sabbotage(maybe even an op to out a weak link in the administration staff).
What did Hegseth really do? We know what Hillary really did and reasonably suspect the rest.
At the very least, it sounds like they need some changes in the app and/or the protocols for it’s use if they plan to continue with it. Perhaps there should be a form creating a meeting list should pull from contacts that includes a screen name, real name, status (“sec. def.”, “journalist”, etc.), phone number and such for each person, and any entry not carrying that info would be rejected. Subsequently, there should be at least a second party review and approval of the list, and the chat could only be initiated from that list.
That may be closing the barn door after the horse in this incident, but others are still in the barn.
I think this whistles past the graveyard. It’s bad for a similar reason as to why Hillary Clinton’s server was bad: It circumvents the normal classification process. The information doesn’t have a natural path back to being captured, either as part of the official record or to have proper classification put on it.
The other points you made, while also bad, are more of a symptom of that than the cause… If the information had gone through the proper channels, there would be no way to add people to the conversation without appropriate access.
If I were in charge, and I’m not, but if I were, I’d set up something like Signal (because I see the benefit of having a point to point encrypted group chat) the was proprietary to the US government that complied with the official records act, the freedom of information act, and the espionage act. I can’t imagine it would be insurmountably difficult.
Well done HT. You have done an excellent job distinguishing the differences. Still, I am not sure about the claim that he communicated troop movements. I may be splitting hairs but I have not seen or heard that any targets were discussed let alone methods of attack on specific targets.
Sure, I suppose that one could discern that Houthis would be attacked and given that they are in Yemen primarily you could derive from that that our assets would be moving somewhere in Yemen so all Houthis might be on alert, but I would expect them to be on high alert at all times anyway. But this is far different than what Goldberg claimed when when said targets and timing were discussed. Even after the Atlantic published everything he had after the story broke, there were no specific target discussed.
What is also missing from most stories was that members also stated certain information would be discussed on the “high side” which has been explained as the secure classified channel. Another point that is missing is that Goldberg signed in using initials which are the same as Jamison Greer the trade envoy in the region and not his actual name. Hegseth would not have been able to distinguish between the two.
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that no one seems to be asking the Waltz staffer who created the Houthi Small Group and included Goldberg “inadvertently” why he had Goldberg’s contact info in the first place. Even if the two names were on his contact roster in close proximity I don’t believe that just anyone is allowed to communicate with the press at the NSA.
Anyway Great Job.
Still, I am not sure about the claim that he communicated troop movements.
And so what if he was discussing “troop movements” with other people of equal rank with the authority to discuss troop movements?
You know who gets to discuss troop movements?
The guy in charge of the troops doing the movements.
“HEY SIR? Can we discuss the coming battle at some point?”
“Nah man, I, the Secretary of Defense, am not allowed to discuss troop movements because someone might say we’re not allowed to discuss sensitive topics or something like that.”
“SIR? Then who IS allowed?”
“Beats me, the whole line of reasoning doesn’t make sense”
I mean… That was my point about classification authorities. All they have to do is say: “I’m in charge of determining whether or not this is classified, I chose to communicate it, so it’s obviously not” and that has the benefit of probably being correct, and it’s something that Hillary could not have said.
But… I think we need to be honest here. Information in that conversation should not have been transmitted to an editor of The Atlantic. It’s careless and stupid, and if instead of Jeffrey Goldblum, you had some shitty activist online smear-merchant, that information could have been publicly disseminated before the attack, it could have impacted operation efficiency, and it could have cost American lives. Regardless of how other things were worse, regardless on how technically it may have been permissible, it’s not good.
*Goldberg…. Jesus.
I don’t get it though. In the past 100+ years of the highest ranking people engaging in conversations they’re allowed to and must engage in, when have we ever demanded they explain to us they are allowed to?
Never. It’s a known part of their role.
What’s different this time?
The only thing the admin has to communicate is “we were engaged in a high level discussion and a journalist was accidentally included, it won’t happen again”
So whats different about this administration that suddenly this administration has to explain routine things it is legally allowed to do?
I’m not convinced that Signal is the best platform for conversations like this, but you’re right, we’re talking about plenary authorities, so really… We can have opinions on the appropriateness, but there’s not much doubt that this is legal.
The problem is that Jeffrey Goldberg was in that chat. And you just can’t get past that…. It didn’t need to be Jeffrey Goldberg, it could have been Rashida Tlaib, and she could have conveyed that information directly to the Houthis, and a hundred Americans could have ended up in caskets. It is moral and ethical luck that it just happened to work out this time, and I think that deserves more than an “aw shucks, we’ll do better next time.” I mean really… In what universe would you have ever considered saying the words: “At least we leaked information to as responsible a journalist as Jeffrey fuckin’ Goldberg”?
It should give you chills.
You are correct it deserves more than a “we’ll do better next time” and I certainly thought I included something like that in my hypothetical administration response (I know I have elsewhere in the past 5 posts on this topic).
“We were engaged in a high level discussion and a journalist was accidentally included, it won’t happen again. We will find out exactly how this happened and deal with those responsible”
And yes, there’s room for a discussion on whether or not Signal is the right place for this type of meeting. But as of the time of the event in question, it was an approved ‘secure’ means for personnel to have conversations.
(I still don’t see it as a problem. I would prefer a government only app like you describe. But it also makes no sense in an age with the communication technology we have available to expect administration personnel to still try to have constant face to face meetings when something like this suffices for an real time update. The problem again, is *how* did the journalist get included.)
Once again, we are at the infuriating point where it is impossible to get an un-spun, un-distorted, straightforward explanation of what the issues are, with most conservative news sources downplaying the episode and most Axis sources gleefully “pouncing.”
Regardless of who is or isn’t allowed to talk about this, this strikes me as actually more straightforward than we’re letting on. A handful of questions and observations this whole episode boils down to:
How did the journalist get invited to this top level group? His inclusion in this is incompetence at best nefarious behavior at worst. Michael Waltz I think has claimed he doesn’t even know the guy – implying he wouldn’t have had his contact info just on his phone ready to go – implying then that someone fed him the contact info to add under the idea it was someone else who was supposed to be in the conversation.
If that’s the case, then who fed Waltz the number, and was that an accident or intentional?
If it isn’t the case, and Waltz did have this guy’s number, he is the one who made the mistake AND has lied about it.
What is the level of content they were discussing? There’s waffling about calling these “war plans” versus “attack plans” and great deal of consternation about how to label what was discussed. It seems like spin and obfuscation. Regardless of what the content being discussed could be “labelled”, the intent here is to discover if this is the kind of topic that our leaders should be discussing on Signal. We already know Signal is approved for government use. So really the next question is, is the content of this discussion “safe” for Signal use?
If Signal is safe for its use, then the real proper response by the administration is “sorry, the inclusion of the journalist was a gross error and it won’t happen again and we’ll figure out how it happened.”
If Signal isn’t safe for this particular use then the administration broke a lot of rules somewhere.
Who decides if it is or isn’t ok for this topic to be discussed on Signal? I’ve seen a lot of people raise their hackles about “If I worked for the DoD and discussed this on Signal, I’d be fired”. But there’s a difference between “My boss who has the authority decide where discussions can be had told me I cannot discuss this here” and “My boss who has the authority to decide where discussions can be had chose to discuss this here”.
If Hegseth and the others have the authority to choose where discussions about sensitive matters are held, then that kind of ends this discussion other than the part of the discussion about “how did the journalist get in”. They could literally ban their subordinates from talking about things like this on signal while continuing to use signal themselves *IF* they are the deciding authority.
If Hegseth, et al, do NOT have this authority, then yeah, they broke a bunch of rules. But we’re talking about the highest ranking members of the administration before you get to Trump himself. I find it hard to believe they don’t have this decision making authority.
Consider this: If we were facing combat with some other country and the leader of the Department of Defense stood on a podium and declared to the other country: “We will be attacking you at 5 pm on Friday the 2nd of January. We will launch a massive preparatory strike against your anti-air defenses. We will then fly in low from the northeast and bomb the snot out of your weapons manufacturing facility.”
Comments about such a statement would probably be “that is really, really stupid to declare this to our enemy” (even though there are valid times to tell people you are capable of doing something to them with impunity, and there are also valid times like when Israel seeks to give civilians ample time to depart).
But I’m hard pressed seeing how such a statement would actually be illegal. And if something like that wouldn’t be illegal – then it’s even harder to see how a group of people authorized to make these decisions having this discussion in a private chat group approved for government use would run afoul of any legal considerations.
This still seems to be boiling down to two issues:
The mistaken or intended inclusion of the journalist.
The lack of a “we’ll make sure this can’t or won’t happen again” statement by the administration.
Even the “spin” by the administration will turn out not to be spin when a lot of the above questions are answered the way I think they will be answered.
Train wreck? I don’t think so.
Well, that didn’t format properly – all the outlines and numbering that WordPress indicated would be there didn’t translate after hitting “send”
“The mistaken or intended inclusion of the journalist.”
This is where I’m stuck. Never mind the rest of it. Just how? I still don’t understand how the participants didn’t notice, either by phone number or initials, that there was a party to the conversation that they didn’t recognize. I was able to find online a picture of the actual thread. At the top of the thread is a generic “group” icon, and underneath it is the name Houthi PC small group. Underneath that is says “19 members.” No one checked to see who those 19 members were before they ran their fat fingers over their keyboards? No one? Heck, I immediately check to see who is in a group chat before I respond with a single word – and that’s with my own damn family.
Yeah it’s a very frustrating component.
Boils down certainly to a degree of diffusion of responsibility or a sort of “bystander effect” – in a large group, *most people* will assume someone else has done the work and also an assumption that once the single task is done to confirm existing conditions and nothing else changes, then you don’t need to check again.
Which is why this will boil down to – the individual in charge of the group and the individual who was specifically tasked with forming the chat group and adding members (which by the way – as far as I can tell, you can’t just be added to a group – you are invited and have to accept – so ethics mark against the journalist for accepting without asking why he was being invited to the group).
As for the one in charge of adding members – did he have someone working for him assembling and labeling the contact information and he assumed the contacts were checked?
you are invited and have to accept – so ethics mark against the journalist for accepting without asking why he was being invited to the group
Exactly.
Again, I don’t believe a journalist exists who wouldn’t treat this an opportunity. As long as he’s not going tp reveal the details, he’s in the clear by the ethics of journalism. Like when a reporter is on a call with an official, and the official thinks he’s hung up but the speaker is one…and the official says, “Thank goodness that reporter doesn’t know that we’ve decided….” The reporter is supposed to hang up?
“in the clear by the ethics of journalism” is a big screaming industry level rationalization if I ever heard one.
The reporter is supposed to hang up?
If he or she is ethical. Yes. Yes they are supposed to. But journalism isn’t an ethical industry anymore – its own “code of ethics” is one rationalization after another.
It has its own ethical boundaries, and this one is traditional. you may not like journalism ethics, but what Goldberg did is right down the alley. Should Woodward have refused to listen to Deep Throat? There’s no difference. Felt was breaking the law.
There’s no difference. Felt was breaking the law.
Hegseth and company weren’t. So there is a difference.
It has its own ethical boundaries, and this one is traditional. you may not like journalism ethics, but what Goldberg did is right down the alley.
#1A “It’s always been done this way”
But tthe freedom of the press carries the presumption of adversarial relationship to things that need to be addressed/reveal. Is there some ethical expectation that a journalist should only reveal or know about secrets because some one was authorized to reveal the secrets…. It seems that that would ethically destroy investigative journalism or whistle blowers.
The freedom of the press doesn’t carry presumption of access to high level meetings of sensitive or possibly confidential topics. If it did, there would be no such thing as secrete meetings.
A journalist (in fact, any human, behaving ethically that is) invited unexpectedly to a chat group of high level administration people should find out why.
1.”A journalist (in fact, any human, behaving ethically that is) invited unexpectedly to a chat group of high level administration people should find out why.” Sparking an investigation by Congress would seem an effective way of doing that.
2. “The freedom of the press doesn’t carry presumption of access to high level meetings of sensitive or possibly confidential topics. If it did, there would be no such thing as secret meetings.” A meeting that is so botched that it allows a journalist into it a) isn’t secret and b)provides exactly what journalists are looking for as they (supposedly) try to root out incompetence, corruption and the abuse of power. The Pentagon Papers were stolen, and SCOTUS ruled that they could be published.
And again- his ‘discovery’ is only useful in forcing a question of “is signal an appropriate app”(which no one here disagrees with). His ‘discovery’ is not doing what a great number of people (including him) think it’s doing revealing the administration communicating in unapproved ways…
I still don’t get the effort to make this more than it is.
“Again, I don’t believe a journalist exists who wouldn’t treat this an opportunity.”
#1, #23, #32, #32B, #54
“As long as he’s not going tp reveal the details, he’s in the clear by the ethics of journalism.”
#22, #44
Like when a reporter is on a call with an official, and the official thinks he’s hung up but the speaker is one…and the official says, “Thank goodness that reporter doesn’t know that we’ve decided….” The reporter is supposed to hang up?
#18, #36B
—- Off topic – something is wrong with the rationalization list – a large number of them no longer format separately but form a handful of big long blob paragraphs.
This is absolutely right. When I worked for the CD Club, we weren’t allowed to hang up when the call ended. We had to wait for the caller to disconnect.
More than once, a caller who claimed to have gotten billed for a CD that wasn’t received was told the charge would be removed (at cost to the company) only for the caller to crow to whoever was in the background that “I just got a free CD!” without realizing the call hadn’t ended when he or she said, “Good-Bye”. T
The calls were recorded.
Those calls got forwarded to our fraud team.
Should I have warned the caller that I was still on the line?
Ok, I’ll backtrack a hair here and modify my initial analysis, because your instance here prompts some reevaluation.
My back tracking here opens up 2 things:
Oh, now wordpress keeps the outlined formatting….
“Presumably, if someone butt dialed you at your CD job and you overheard them randomly chatting with a friend about getting free CDs, your recording would carry virtually no weight with your fraud department.“
Likely, but not because of any ethical issues. If someone accidentally butt-dialed us, we would have no idea who was calling us. Our systems weren’t sophisticated enough to pull information up on our mainframe by just a phone call. Some phone systems at some companies still aren’t.
“I assume when someone called you, everyone in the conversation identified themselves and there was no mystery the topic of the conversation.“
In general, yes. There were the occasional callers who refused to give us identifying information and, yet, insisted we fix the problem anyway. But the process did involve verifying identities, yes.
However, once one party thought the call was over, it didn’t necessarily negate anything that was said. If I’d thought the caller had disconnected and I had made some kind of disparaging remark, it would have treated the same as if I’d known the caller was still on the phone. In fact, the caller may or may not alert me that the line was still active. For the same reason, the caller blurting out pertinent information after he or she thought I wasn’t there anymore would have been reported. In that case, I wouldn’t tell the caller the line was still active. Operating in the capacity of my job, I would have alerted the appropriate department.
In the case of Goldberg, this would be more of a situation in which he, operating in the capacity of his job, learned information because the others didn’t realize he was there (even if he wasn’t supposed to be there at all from the beginning). Of course, he’s going to use it. His job is to report news. My job was to make my company money and minimize losses.
Unfortunately, the fraud team couldn’t keep up with all the liars and scammers. We eventually went out of business.
A reporter accidentally eavesdropping on what appears to be an inadvertent national security breach of this sort should “raise his hand” and let the problem be known. Whether he plans to reveal the details is irrelevant; he doesn’t know if there might be other, less benign, parties also in the loop. That could have serious life and death consequences, not just embarrassment for a few pols, or revelation of criminal behavior that might be useful for a juicy scoop.
Would a battlefield reporter, seeing flaw in his sides defenses, run off to file his story about the mistake and leave the commander to find out about it later…one way or the other?
Would a battlefield reporter, seeing flaw in his sides defenses, run off to file his story about the mistake and leave the commander to find out about it later…one way or the other?
We eventually get just next to that topic:
https://ethicsalarms.com/2012/12/05/the-man-on-the-subway-tracks/#comment-55994
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” also comes to mind….
I might repeat this in a post, but it’s the quintessence of “res ipsa loquitur.” The journalist on the chat is like the toe in the plug of tobacco.
It’s *a* toe in the plug of tobacco and a mark against the tobacco packager’s incompetence in making sure no mistakes slip by.
But I think it matters *whose* toe if the tobacco packager is being undermined or if the packager is just colossally inept even beyond the mistake of letting the toe get past inspection.
Here’s Hillary’s op ed today in the Times (which wouldn’t give me my gift link):
It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.
This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.
In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.
Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.
Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.
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If they’re this reckless with America’s hard power, it’s no surprise that they’re shredding our soft power. As a former secretary of state, I am particularly alarmed by the administration’s plan to close embassies and consulates, fire diplomats and destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development. Let me explain why this matters, because it’s less widely understood than the importance of tanks and fighter jets.
I visited 112 countries and traveled nearly one million miles as America’s top diplomat, and I have seen how valuable it is for our country to be represented on the ground in far-flung places. The U.S. military has long understood that our forces must be forward deployed in order to project American power and respond quickly to crises. The same is true of our diplomats. Our embassies are our eyes and ears informing policy decisions back home. They are launchpads for operations that keep us safe and prosperous, from training foreign counterterrorism forces to helping U.S. companies enter new markets.
China understands the value of forward-deployed diplomacy, which is why it has opened new embassies and consulates around the world and now has more than the United States. The Trump administration’s retreat would leave the field open for Beijing to spread its influence uncontested.
Diplomats win America friends so we don’t have to go it alone in a competitive world. That’s how my colleagues and I were able to rally the United Nations to impose crippling sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and ultimately force Tehran to stop its progress toward a bomb — something Mr. Trump’s bluster has failed to do. (He actually defunded inspectors keeping an eye on Iranian research sites. Dumb.)
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Diplomacy is cost-effective, especially compared with military action. Preventing wars is cheaper than fighting them. Mr. Trump’s own former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, told Congress, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”
Our development assistance has always been a small portion of the federal budget, but it also has an outsize impact on international stability, especially paired with effective diplomacy. When American aid dollars help stop a famine or an outbreak, when we respond to a natural disaster or open schools, we win hearts and minds that might otherwise go to terrorists or rivals like China. We reduce the flow of migrants and refugees. We strengthen friendly governments that might otherwise collapse.
I don’t want to pretend that any of this is easy or that American foreign policy hasn’t been plagued by mistakes. Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them.
Smart reforms could make federal agencies, including the State Department and U.S.A.I.D., more efficient and effective. During the Clinton administration, my husband’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Al Gore, worked with Congress to thoughtfully streamline bureaucracy, modernize the work force and save billions of dollars. In many ways it was the opposite of the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach. Today they are not reinventing government; they’re wrecking it.
All of this is both dumb and dangerous. And I haven’t even gotten to the damage Mr. Trump is doing by cozying up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blowing up our alliances — force multipliers that extend our reach and share our burdens — and trashing our moral influence by undermining the rule of law at home. Or how he’s tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt. Propagandists in Beijing and Moscow know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function. If America is ruled like a banana republic, with flagrant corruption and a leader who puts himself above the law, we lose that argument. We also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable.
If there’s a grand strategy at work here, I don’t know what it is. Maybe Mr. Trump wants to return to 19th-century spheres of influence. Maybe he’s just driven by personal grudges and is in way over his head. As a businessman, he bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos. Now he’s gambling with the national security of the United States. If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us
Good lord, did she compose that stream of consciousness?
That reads like a freshman college kid ranting on a sociology essay.
Guess she doesn’t hire ghost writers anymore.
Or she is hiring ghost writers and snagged a recent Gen Z graduate of some failing journalism school somewhere.
Holy cow! HRC’s screed reads like explosive diarrhea from a (still) very very bitter woman. Apparently she hasn’t moved on, even a little. That old gal is in some serious need of spiritual healing, exercise, and fact checking.
Here’s Hillary’s op ed today in the Times (which wouldn’t give me my gift link):
It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.
This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.
In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.
Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.
Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.
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If they’re this reckless with America’s hard power, it’s no surprise that they’re shredding our soft power. As a former secretary of state, I am particularly alarmed by the administration’s plan to close embassies and consulates, fire diplomats and destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development. Let me explain why this matters, because it’s less widely understood than the importance of tanks and fighter jets.
I visited 112 countries and traveled nearly one million miles as America’s top diplomat, and I have seen how valuable it is for our country to be represented on the ground in far-flung places. The U.S. military has long understood that our forces must be forward deployed in order to project American power and respond quickly to crises. The same is true of our diplomats. Our embassies are our eyes and ears informing policy decisions back home. They are launchpads for operations that keep us safe and prosperous, from training foreign counterterrorism forces to helping U.S. companies enter new markets.
China understands the value of forward-deployed diplomacy, which is why it has opened new embassies and consulates around the world and now has more than the United States. The Trump administration’s retreat would leave the field open for Beijing to spread its influence uncontested.
Diplomats win America friends so we don’t have to go it alone in a competitive world. That’s how my colleagues and I were able to rally the United Nations to impose crippling sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and ultimately force Tehran to stop its progress toward a bomb — something Mr. Trump’s bluster has failed to do. (He actually defunded inspectors keeping an eye on Iranian research sites. Dumb.)
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Diplomacy is cost-effective, especially compared with military action. Preventing wars is cheaper than fighting them. Mr. Trump’s own former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, told Congress, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”
Our development assistance has always been a small portion of the federal budget, but it also has an outsize impact on international stability, especially paired with effective diplomacy. When American aid dollars help stop a famine or an outbreak, when we respond to a natural disaster or open schools, we win hearts and minds that might otherwise go to terrorists or rivals like China. We reduce the flow of migrants and refugees. We strengthen friendly governments that might otherwise collapse.
I don’t want to pretend that any of this is easy or that American foreign policy hasn’t been plagued by mistakes. Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them.
Smart reforms could make federal agencies, including the State Department and U.S.A.I.D., more efficient and effective. During the Clinton administration, my husband’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Al Gore, worked with Congress to thoughtfully streamline bureaucracy, modernize the work force and save billions of dollars. In many ways it was the opposite of the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach. Today they are not reinventing government; they’re wrecking it.
All of this is both dumb and dangerous. And I haven’t even gotten to the damage Mr. Trump is doing by cozying up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blowing up our alliances — force multipliers that extend our reach and share our burdens — and trashing our moral influence by undermining the rule of law at home. Or how he’s tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt. Propagandists in Beijing and Moscow know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function. If America is ruled like a banana republic, with flagrant corruption and a leader who puts himself above the law, we lose that argument. We also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable.
If there’s a grand strategy at work here, I don’t know what it is. Maybe Mr. Trump wants to return to 19th-century spheres of influence. Maybe he’s just driven by personal grudges and is in way over his head. As a businessman, he bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos. Now he’s gambling with the national security of the United States. If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us
Just so you know, you posted this twice.
Those logging in either used their initials or some other truncated name. Jamison Greer is the trade rep for the middle east and might have been rationally included given that other Arab states would be affected. That is why JG questioned when it showed up on the manifest.
Admittedly, I don’t know how Signal works. If you tap on the “19 members” or the group icon what would you see? Just a list of initials? That doesn’t seem to make sense. I would think like most apps there would be a list of names with the initials in a “bubble” next to each name. Who knows. I just know it irks me no end.
Alicia,
It was reported that the names were chosen from a contact list on the phone and the number associated with the name (or initials) that the creator of the chat chose appears to have been the number for the reporter not the individual that he wanted to choose. As far as I can tell the contact list either had an incorrect number for the person he thought he was selecting or the contact list had duplicate or nearly duplicate names for who he wanted to choose and the reporter. If the name that showed up in the chat list as the person who they intended to include in the chat and not the reporter then no one would have known, if the name showed up as the reporters name then in my opinion everyone on the chat was negligent, you must know who you are conversing with when talking about any kind of information that is perceived as sensitive, confidential, or secret.
It’s unclear to me why anyone in the administration at any high level would have the phone number of a reporter included in the contact list of their official use phone, especially in the contact list so it’s not 100% clear that it is a reporter contact with full name and no psydonyme, etc. The government needs some very clear protocol’s when it comes to this kind of thing to prevent unintentional leaks and it appears that they don’t have them.
They need to find the root cause of the number being on his phone.
“They need to find the root cause of the number being on his phone.”
I’m certain that Team Trump is more motivated to discover the root cause than anyone else.
A few points for those who are unaware: hackers can make things appear and disappear on PCs and cell phones, or to put it another way, hackers can remotely populate or depopulate information on computers and cell phones.
Given the history of the Obama administration and the Biden cabal weaponizing the FBI for nefarious purposes, it’s not even a little bit crazy to consider that a hacker under the direction of the Biden cabal created a well concealed backdoor into the Signal app. prior to Biden leaving office. Moreover, there may very well be other similar security intrusions installed into current government communication programs and I’ll bet some of the Musk computer savants are looking.
What are the odds that it just so happens to be Jeffrey Goldberg of all people who mysteriously appears on the app? If Team Trump has already concluded that the Signal app was/is compromised, they would not divulge that info as they search for the breach and look bad while trying to explain things. They’re in an embarrassing no-win situation as far as optics which is exactly what the plan would be if this was a hack.
Inquiring minds want to know…🤠
Outstanding Comment of the Day!
Ov course it can be ignored. And is being, in case you haven’t noticed.