It has been a rough week for national security adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the rest of the Trump administration’s national security team. The so-called Signalgate catastrophe, in which Waltz organized a top-secret chat on the Signal messenger application about pending U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen, only to accidentally add one of Washington’s most famous journalists to the conversation, is the epitome of a blunder. The White House’s attempts at damage control—at one point, Waltz insisted he couldn’t pick journalist Jeffrey Goldberg out of a lineup, only for an old picture to surface of the two of them standing next to each other at the French Embassy in Washington—has created only more problems.
The Washington punditocracy sees blood in the water. So do Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who have called on Waltz and Hegseth to resign for sharing top-secret information through an unclassified channel. The Senate Armed Services Committee has called for an investigation by the Defense Department’s inspector general. And a federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to preserve the Signal messages for the public record. The whole thing is one big, embarrassing scandal.
This is a serious issue. If any junior analyst in the U.S. government acted the way Waltz or Hegseth did, they would have been fired immediately. Sharing war plans outside U.S. government systems is the kind of offense that is almost too stupid to commit. And just reading that a journalist was invited to the chat makes one’s IQ score drop.
Even so, Signalgate is such an obsession that it’s clouding discussions that are more important than the intra-administration knife fights the pundits love to cover. For instance, we’ve spent more time over the last week debating whether Waltz should be shown the door than we have in scrutinizing whether an extensive U.S. strike campaign in Yemen will actually work. And at a time when so many are worried about America’s system of checks and balances becoming an artifact, I find it ironic that nobody seems to care about the president in effect declaring war on his own.
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