The Trump administration’s initial response to the damaging leak of sensitive war plans has been to task billionaire Elon Musk with leading an investigation into the matter. But national security experts have pointed out the real problem is the administration’s decision to host an unsecured chat—not that a reporter was granted access to it, which is what Musk’s investigation will apparently focus on.
“Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat, again to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday.
Musk is not an expert in cybersecurity. He is a businessman who invests in technology companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). Unlike other tech industry innovators, Musk has not invented new technologies. Instead, he has used his money, along with government bailout funding, to invest and reinvest, building his fortune.
And even those companies have had technical problems, whether it is SpaceX’s exploding rockets or Tesla Cybertruck’s shedding paneling due to insufficient glue application.
In all likelihood, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the administration’s Signal chat not through nefarious means, but because he was invited to participate by one of the chat participants or their staffers. An account in Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz’s name was the one that Goldberg says invited him to the chat.
Wired reported on Wednesday that Waltz also had an unsecured Venmo account listing journalists and others as his “friends” on the service. It isn’t a stretch to make a connection between Waltz, the chat channel, and other journalists in Washington, D.C., like Goldberg.
The real concern is the existence of the chat channel in the first place.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth defended his actions in the channel in comments to reporters on Wednesday, arguing that no sensitive data was disclosed.
“My job—as it said, on top of that, everybody's seen it now, ‘team update’—is to provide updates in real time, general updates in real time. Keep everybody informed. That's what I did. That's my job,” Hegseth said.
Experts on security disagree.
“It was just truly astounding that we would see that released in the form of a non-secure government channel,” former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told CNN on Wednesday. Responding to the Trump administration’s spin, Hagel said, “There's either gross incompetence here or they're flat out lying.”
Kevin Carroll, a national security expert and veteran of the Army and CIA who served in the first Trump administration, told NPR that someone involved in this kind of leak—involving operational information about military action—is usually “immediately fired.”
Carroll also noted that the example of senior officials evading consequences for the leak while junior officers have been fired for less egregious releases is toxic to morale within the armed forces.
Even a Fox News reporter has unearthed a contradictory take to the administration’s spin.
Regarding the data the Hegseth posted to the chat, national security reporter Jennifer Griffin noted, “This information is typically sent through classified channels to the commanders in the field as ‘secret, no forn’ message. In other words the information is ‘classified’ and should not be shared through insecure channels.”
The Trump administration has tried to make the leak story about the reporter, his motivations, his family, and how he was added to the chat. They have tasked a wealthy donor who has no relevant experience to probe the issue.
But the real problem is the chat shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and American security was violated as a result.
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