At last, Pete Hegseth has stepped forward to answer questions about the Secret Signal Chat which inadvertently included Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg.
Each of the members of this controversy have come forward in the past to strongly criticize Hillary Clinton for her email scandal arguing that she clearly should be “Locked Up.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host; White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller; national security adviser Mike Waltz; and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have all made public comments in the past attacking officials under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for allegedly being sloppy with sensitive government information. CNN reached out to the officials’ agencies for comment.
Much of that criticism has revolved around Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was Secretary of State under President Obama.
Rubio, identified by Goldberg in the chat as “MAR,” repeatedly attacked Clinton over the issue in 2015 and 2016 – tweeting about it at least a dozen times.
“Nobody is above the law. Not even Hillary Clinton – even though she thinks she is,” he said on Fox News in January 2016.
In an August 2015 Fox News interview, Rubio noted that classified information should only be viewed in a secure room to protect it from unauthorized access or surveillance.
“You most certainly know you shouldn’t be talking about it or passing it on in an email, particularly to a private server like the one she had. What they did is reckless – it’s complete recklessness and incompetence.”
In a November 2016 Fox News appearance, Hegseth called Clinton’s use of the email server, “criminal.”
“People have gone to jail for 1/100th of what – even 1/1,000th of what Hillary Clinton did.”
In September 2017, Hegseth criticized Clinton’s use of the server on Fox News, calling her “such a corrupt politician,” and her actions “reckless.”
Waltz, who invited The Atlantic journalist to the group chat, similarly tweeted his outrage that the Department of Justice did not pursue charges against Clinton for her private messages.
“Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. [Ed. No, he didn’t] And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing,” Waltz tweeted in June 2023.
Earlier that week, Waltz lamented, “How is it Hillary Clinton can delete 33,000 government emails on a private server yet President Trump gets indicted for having documents he could declassify?” [Because he didn’t declassify them.]
Well, let’s just discuss that shall we?
1. Hegseth as head of an agency has the ability to declassify that agency’s information, as he has apparently done with the information from the chat. Hillary also had this ability, only she delegated it to her staff - which is allowed. They used it to downgrade the classification of notes they sent her from (C) "Confidential" - one of the lowest levels of classification to (U) "Unclassified." They left them as (C) to indicate that the source material had been Confidential, these markings would appear in paragraphs where these quotations from other documents were inserted. There were only 3 emails where this was the case.
On Tuesday, FBI Director James Comey stated with respect to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails: "Only a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information."
[...]
First, Director Comey explained that he was talking about only three emails out of the 30,000 his office reviewed, or 1/100 of 1% of the emails.
Second, Director Comey explained that these three specific emails were not properly marked as classified pursuant to federal guidelines and manuals. They did not have a classification header, and they did not list the original classifier, the agency and office of origin, the reason for classification, or the date for declassification. Instead they included only a single "(c)" for "confidential" on one paragraph lower down in the text.
Finally, Director Comey explained that it would have been a "reasonable inference" for Secretary Clinton to "immediately" conclude that these emails were not in fact classified.
There were additional messages (110) which the FBI considerd “classified” at the time they were sent and (2,093) that were “retroactively” determined to contain classified information by the FOIA office, Hillary herself sent 104 of these messages — none of those were marked classified when created. This is not a small issue — decades ago I worked for 12 years in a classified environment and in that world every document had to have a classification mark of some type. Usually Confidention, Secret, Top Secret or Unclassified. The markings exist so that there is clarity as to how each document is to be treated and protected. For example, only Unclassified documents can go in the normal trash — everything else had to be disposed of in a “burn barrell.” All classified documents had to be stored in locked cabinets when not being read, used, or when unclassified personel were in the room. Xerox copies could not be made of classified documents. My job for the first 5 years included literally placing the classification markings on all computer printed documents. If a document was mis-marked when printed, it had to be destroyed.
From what I can tell these message were not intended to contain classified info, but in the course of the back and forth discussions happening in those emails classified subjects were referenced. Again, having worked in a classified environment [albiet prior to the common use of email], the subject of the environment itself can come up in discussion. Specifically I worked as part of the B2 Stealth Bomber and other projects, and although the very existence of that bomber and project was technically “classified” — it was also common knowledge and theory that it existed and it was regularly referenced in the media. Just talking about the media reports as a part of doing their job could technically be considered a “classified” discussion, even if that wasn’t the intent. It really depends on exactly what was said and whether it revealed something sensitive that the media didn’t know.
Similarly, The fact that Hegseth’s messages weren’t “marked” classified doesn’t mean that they weren’t potentially damaging. The details of the attack were not known in the media.
2. Regardless of classification status, the legal statute relates to deliberate or negligent release of "National Defense" information which the Signal Chat certainly was so the fact that Hegseth has declassified them retroactively doesn't matter - either way, it should have been considered classified, and really, the fact that they claim that it isn’t is frankly a bigger scandal than a reporter being in the chat group.
A purported former CIA lawyer who goes under the pseudonym "Secrets and Laws" posted a side-by-side comparison of one of the statements made by Hegseth in the Signal chat, beside "the applicable CENTCOM Classification Guide provisions."
CENTCOM is the United States Central Command and serves as one of the 11 combatant commands in the Department of Defense, its website explains. The details they cited appear on page 35 of the classification guide.
The details prohibited in the guide include, "Concept of operations, including order of battle, execution circumstances, operating locations, resources required, tactical maneuvers, deployments, action and objectives."
Many of these elements were included in Hegseth’s posts. If this information had been released or been discovered by our adversaries our forces could have been at dire risk — which is the entire point of why things are classified.
Hillary's actions were not considered "Negligent" under the law largely because mostly she didn't do it, her staff did. Several of them were disciplined.
3. The primary "Mistake" in Signalgate was the inclusion of Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg in the message chain. Goldberg while not cleared has refrained from releasing the key data publically (until yesterday apparently as he has released more details) however the Pentagon had announced last week that Signal was not recommended as a tool for secure conversations because foreign assets had been able to hack it.
Pentagon employees were notified as recently as a week ago not to use Signal for government communications due to security risks.
NPR's Tom Bowman reported Tuesday that all agency employees received an email a week before warning about vulnerabilities in the encrypted app, which was used by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other leading national security officials to discuss war plans on March 15, with a journalist added to the group chat by national security adviser Mike Waltz, perhaps unknowingly.
"A vulnerability has been identified in the Signal messenger application," the email begins.
So it’s entirely possible that any one of these personal cell phones could have been hacked and compromised by China, Russia or North Korea and we’d probably never know. All of these people would be high-value targets, and it’s been reported that China tried to hack Trump’s personal cell phone long ago.
Chinese state-sponsored hackers may have spied on phones belonging to Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, after secretly infiltrating US telecommunication networks.
The New York Times reports that US investigators notified the Trump campaign about the potential spying, which occurred when Chinese hackers gained access to Verizon’s phone systems. Trump and Vance are among a group of people within and outside the US government to be targeted, which also included staff members of Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.
On Friday, the FBI confirmed that it's investigating the threat of Chinese hackers breaching US telecommunication networks.
Getting the data from the phone — where it’s decrypted — is certainly smarter than trying to capture it in transit when it’s encoded.
And, oh by the way, most of the data concerning the Trumper’s phones is public information via Der Speigel.
Donald Trump's most important security advisers used Signal to discuss an imminent military strike. Now, reporting by DER SPIEGEL has found that the contact data of some of those officials, including mobile phone numbers, is freely accessible on the internet.
Private contact details of the most important security advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump can be found on the internet. DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials.
To do so, the reporters used commercial people search engines along with hacked customer data that has been published on the web. Those affected by the leaks include National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
[…] It was particularly easy for DER SPIEGEL reporters to discover Hegseth’s mobile number and email address. They turned to a commercial provider of contact information that is primarily used by companies for sales, marketing and recruitment.
DER SPIEGEL sent the provider a link to Hegseth’s LinkedIn profile and received a Gmail address and a mobile phone number in return, in addition to other information. A search of leaked user data revealed that the email address and, in some cases, even the password associated with it, could be found in over 20 publicly accessible leaks. Using publicly available information, it was possible to verify that the email address was used just a few days ago.
The mobile number provided, meanwhile, led to a WhatsApp account that Hegseth apparently only recently deleted. The profile photo showed a shirtless Hegseth in a baseball cap and necklace. Comparisons with other photos of the U.S. secretary of defense using facial recognition software were able to confirm that the photo on the WhatsApp profile was indeed Hegseth.
So, whose betting that China and Russia aren’t this smart?
Hillary's server was never breached or hacked although attempts were made and thwarted by her dedicated IT staff. This likely wouldn't have happened if she had used a service like yahoo.com or gmail.com, and she would have been hacked just as the State dept internal email system was previously hacked by GRU. If she had had an official State Dept email account — they would have already hacked her. GRU also accessed the White House email system as well as the DNC and Hillary's campaign chairman John Podesta fishing for the non-government emails from Hillary that had been deleted from her private server.
4. Another problem with using SIgnal for official government business is the fact that the messages are eventually deleted which violates the Federal Records Act and also denies FOIA. This is a strategy that was recommended by Project 2025.
Why did the Trump officials use Signal for this, of all things? The reality is that they’re probably using it for a lot; the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has become something of a handbook for the Trump regime, recommends using private apps to conduct official business, so as to evade records-keeping laws. Signal is an app that is marketed for its privacy and message-disappearing features: a single member of a chat can mark messages to be deleted, permanently, for all members. (In another seemingly illegal move, Waltz reportedly set the messages in the war-planning group chat to disappear after a matter of weeks.)
Hillary had released all of her government-related emails — anything sent or received from a .gov address and anything mentioning “Benghazi” — in response to a FOIA request. [It was the FOIA people who noted the “classified info” in her emails] After her lawyers accomplished this task they asked if she still needed to keep the rest and she said “No”, so the IT group that handled her server were told to reduce the email retention to just 30 days. They did that.
Later came the Benghazi hearings and the revelation that her email server was private and in her home, which had been Huma Abedin’s idea so her email address wouldn’t be [essentially] HillaryC@att.blackberry.com anymore. Initially, it was in her basement and was a Clinton Foundation server that was later moved to a server farm. The server hosted the domain for clintonemail.com with accounts for Hillary, Abedin and Chelsea Clinton. Abedin’s husband Anthony Weiner had backed up her account on his phone. Hillary had been given advice on using her own email and the server from Colin Powell who himself used AOL and deleted his account — and all his emails — when he left the State Dept. He figured that the State Dept already had copies of every email he’d sent and received from them which satisfied FOIA. Years later, Jared, Ivanka, Betsy Devos and David Shulkin all used their own private email accounts while working for the government. Having your own private email, even on your own server the way Jared & Ivanka did, while working for the government is not illegal. The only requirement is that you forward a copy of any work-related message you get or create to your government account so that it can be captured for FOIA. Chatting on Signal violates that rule.
All of these people now have staff that are capable of setting up a mobile classified and secure telecom chat when needed, [James Comey kept a classified laptop with him] there’s no real justification or reason to use a private encrypted phone chat app.
After the hearings, Congress issued a subpoena for the rest of her emails. Some months after that the IT guy remembered that he had a backup copy of her email archive that he hadn’t deleted when the lawyers told him to, so he did that. He had no idea there was an outstanding subpoena and told all this to the FBI. They believed him and didn’t press charges against him for something he didn’t even know about. Hillary had nothing to do with his mistake.
Eventually, the FBI did find all the rest of her emails by going to the accounts of people she talked to — which is exactly what the GRU were trying to do by hacking the DNC and John Podesta. There was nothing controversial or illegal in them.
5. Attacking Goldberg for the Atlantic correctly reporting on Russia's hacking and influence operations, or the Mueller investigation, cases and convictions is not "lying" about Trump. From what I’ve been able to find the Atlantic reported on the Mueller investigation and even criticized it at the time, but they didn’t engage in rank speculation and most of the stories weren’t written by Goldberg. So exactly why are they attacking Goldberg personally as a “partisan hack” when his name usually isn’t on the Byline? Well, except to generally discredit him.
At the end of Mueller’s Russia investigation, 25 Russians were indicted for email hacking and using social media to influence the election, 8 Trumpers were convicted, 5 of them for lying under oath about their communications with Russians.
If there was nothing to hide, exactly why were they lying under oath about Russia?
Repeatedly, right from the beginning, Trump denied the involvement of the Russians in the hack.
In August 2016, Trump, as the GOP nominee, received an intelligence briefing and was reportedly told that the US intelligence community by then had concluded Moscow was behind the DNC hack and the subsequent dissemination of information stolen from the Democrats. Still, Trump kept denying Russian involvement. At the first presidential debate, he quipped that the DNC hacker “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”
But Trump knew this was false because one of his staffers, George Pappadoplous had been informed by Russian assets that they had hacked the DNC months before it became public knowledge. He actually bragged about this to the Australian ambassador in London and that was what started the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on June 16, 2016 days before Christopher Steele wrote the first memo of his “Dossier” on June 20th, or he gave copies of his memos to the Bruce Orr at the FBI on July 5th.
Let me go into details here because the MAGAs are constantly saying the “Russia Russia Russia” case was a hoax. It was not.
First off, Trump was “Not Exonerated” and Mueller had 10 counts of Obstruction of Justice pending against him which Bill Barr chose to ignore, and then lied about the rest of Mueller’s findings.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday sharply rebuked Attorney General William Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s Russia report, saying Barr had made “misleading public statements” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of President Donald Trump and had shown a “lack of candor.”
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton delivered the criticism in a 23-page order in which he directed the Justice Department to provide him with an unredacted version of the report so that he could decide if any additional information from the document could be publicly disclosed.
The scolding was unusually blunt, with Walton saying Barr had appeared to make a “calculated attempt” to influence public opinion about the report in ways favorable to Trump. The rebuke tapped into lingering criticism of Barr, from Democrats in Congress and special counsel Robert Mueller himself, that he had misrepresented some of the investigation’s most damning findings.
Trump still subscribes to the crackpot theory that Hillary, Perkins Coie and the DNC concocted a plot to embarrass him by planting a false story with Steele about him, Russia and several hookers in the Ritz Carlton Presidential Suite. Special Prosecutor John Durham chased this idea to the far side of the moon and back and only filed charges against two people for supposedly lying to the FBI about being linked to Perkin Coie, only the FBI already knew that — and they didn’t lie — so they were both acquitted of all charges.
The other problem with all that is that Trump’s own bodyguard Keith Schiller has confirmed at least part of the story testifying that Trump was indeed offered four hookers at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow. Keith says he turned the offer down, nobody ever said anything about how Trump himself may have responded.
In retribution, Trump is now trying to knee-cap Perkins-Coie, the law firm that hired Fusion GPS who then subcontracted to Steele for supposed “starting” the investigation of his campaign, but that investigation was already going because of Papadopoulos, who then lied to the FBI about all this.
Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about suggesting sanctions on Russia for the hack and invading Crimea might be dropped by the Trump admin, which shows that they were favorable to them.
Michael Cohen lied to Congress about his trying to arrange to build Trump Tower Moscow with Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov all during 2015-2016.
Manafort associate Alex Van Der Zwaan lied to the FBI about Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates being in contact with GRU asset Konstantin Kilimnick, who the Senate Russia Report indicates gave internal Trump polling data provided by Manafort to the DNC Hacker team. It's not clear if he also got copies of Jared Kushner's Cambridge Analytica demographic detail information which was stolen from Facebook. That data would have been very valuable to the Russian social media influence group who were trying to push Black and Bernie voters into supporting Jill Stein or staying home in 2016.
And Roger Stone lied to Congress under oath about being in contact with Russian Asset Guccifer 2.0 — with whom he discussed hacked files from the DCCC — as well as contacts with Wikileaks and Trump. Both Rick Gates and Steve Bannon testified during his trial that Stone was a “conduit” for Trump to Wikileaks informing them that Wikileaks had additional emails from John Podesta which they hadn’t released yet. Stone’s trial indicates that the Trump campaign contacted him and asked him to have Wikileaks release the Podesta emails just 30 minutes after the “Grab ‘em by the Pussy” tape was released by the Washington Post. Afterward, a Trump staffer emailed Stone to tell him “Well done.”
According to Corsi’s account, Stone frantically called him in the hours before the now-infamous video dropped, demanding that he push Wikileaks into publishing the Podesta emails as a way of diverting attention from the impending story.
Stone’s indictment records an associate of Trump campaign chair Stephen K. Bannon texting Stone “well done” after the release, and states that Stone went on to claim credit for the leak in the days after Wikileaks began the dump.
If he didn’t do anything why was he bragging and taking credit for it? Why did Bannon’s staffer tell him “well done?”
Stone could only have known about the WaPo report before it was posted if someone in the Trump camp told him when the paper asked for a response from the campaign. IMO the only reason that Mueller wasn’t able to build a conspiracy case against Trump for all this is the fact that Manafort, Flynn and Stone all fell on their swords and lied repeatedly until they all were eventually pardoned by Trump as a reward for keeping their mouths shut.
But they tell us there was “No Collusion.” Yeah, right.
Anywho, the Trumpers have also attacked Goldberg for “lying” about Trump and Gold Star Families, but looking at the Atlantic archives they simply reported that Trump denied the statement by the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson that he was “disrespectful.” Except that Rep. Frederica Wilson who was present and listening to the call confirmed Mrs Johnson’s version of events. And Gen. John Kelly also confirmed that he had told Trump to say “this [dying] is what [Sgt Johnson] signed up for.”
None of these were “lies.”
The real reason Trump has a problem with Goldberg is because he wrote the “Suckers and Losers” story that quoted John Kelly. So they’re attacking him over “Russia Russia Russia” and “Gold Star Families” when their real problem is how he wrote about Trump reacting at a military cemetery — but they don’t want to bring that story back up again because it will generate more quotes from Kelly and Gen. MIlley who largely agrees with Kelly that Trump is a “Fascist.”
There’s no reason to question Goldberg’s credibility, but there’s plenty of reasons to question the Trumpsters.
6. The Trumpers have demanded praise for “Finally standing up to the Houthis” arguing that this is something that the Biden campaign didn’t do — or wouldn’t do — but he did.
Last week, the United States, along with the United Kingdom, launched airstrikes against Houthi militants in Yemen. The Houthis—which have been aligned with Iran and rose in prominence during the ongoing civil war in Yemen—had been repeatedly attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea. In a statement, President Joe Biden explained the strikes had “endangered US personnel, civilian mariners, and our partners, jeopardized trade, and threatened freedom of navigation.” According to US officials, the airstrikes left much of the Houthis’ military capabilities intact.
But the US-led airstrikes did accomplish something increasingly rare these days: bringing together some Republicans and Democrats. Almost immediately after the attacks, there was fear of a broadening regional war and pushback from US lawmakers of both parties. In particular, legislators condemned carrying out the airstrikes without prior authorization from Congress, which holds the constitutional power to declare war (even if the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces).
So when Biden attacked the Houthis the response was “Did he ask Congress for permission first?” while the Trumpers are thumping their chest with “America Fuck Yeah” energy. But then again the Biden administration might have gotten better press on these strikes if they only invited a reporter in their secret planning chat. It’s kind of pathetic.
Summary:
The person mostly at risk here is Walz for being “Negligent” and Hegseth for posting National Defense information on an unauthorized system that doesn’t comport with FOIA, or the Presidential and Federal Records Act.
There are many technicalities that mitigate much of the Hillary case with the last element being a lack of “Willful Intent” — she didn’t do any of this on purpose, but these guys don’t have those extended circumstances, and the fact that Project 2025 specifically recommends using Signal to avoid the law, is not a good look.
People like Reality Winner, Jack Texiera and Chelsea Manning have gone to prison for doing just a part of what happened here. Their criticism of Hillary shows that all these people know damn well what they were doing is wrong — they’re just too fracking arrogant to care.
Trump says this is a “Witch Hunt.” Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are not going to investigate this, Republicans don’t really care and are too busy giving themselves“ Woot! We kicked Houthi Ass” high-fives, Democrats can only pepper this pack of nitwits with questions while in unrelated hearings, but the Acting DoD Inspector General Steven Stebbiris just might look into it.
And that might get him fired.
