Signal chat exposes the administration's incompetence

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The discussion revealed unserious people who don’t know when to keep quiet, with Stephen Miller as the real boss

Sidney Blumenthal
Sat 29 Mar 2025 06.00 EDT

On 13 March, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who was the policy director for two secretaries of defense and was a member of the House intelligence committee, sent a message on the commercial Signal app: “Team – establishing a principles group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours.” “The Houthis PC small group” would oversee a US air attack on the Houthis in Yemen.

Despite Waltz’s extensive professional background, he misspelled “principals” as “principles” – perhaps an ordinary typo, but symptomatic of the shambles to come. Although the secretaries of defense, state and treasury, the director of national intelligence, the CIA director, the vice-president, and the president’s chief of staff were among the 18 people included, neither the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, who is a statutory member of the principals committee of the National Security Council, nor any military designee was invited into this group. Instead, the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was sent a link. Waltz noted: “Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days.”

Quite apart from the glaring incompetence and illegality of the whole affair – Goldberg’s careless inclusion, the fact that a provision of the Espionage Act (18 USC § 793) criminalizes “gross negligence” for mishandling classified national security material, and that operating on Signal with timed deletion of messages violates the preservation of records for the National Archives – the conversation pulled back the curtain on the White House.

The transcript exposed the internal pecking order of the Trump administration and its actual chain of command, if it could be called anything that regular. In the end, the final decision-maker within the group to whom the others deferred was not any cabinet secretary or the chief of staff. They turned to “SM” – Stephen Miller – the deputy chief of staff who is Trump’s zealous enforcer. The chief of staff, Susie Wiles, came across as a cheerleader. Miller was the one who gave the stamp of approval. He conveyed Trump’s word. For all intents and purposes, Stephen Miller acted as the de facto president ...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/29/signal-chat-trump-incompetence-stephen-miller

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1. Signal Chat Leak Makes the NSA's Job Harder

Now that everyone uses the same communications technologies, security vulnerabilities are amplified.

By Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
March 28, 2025, 3:14 PM

... “I didn’t see this loser in the group,” Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. “Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out.”

Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may have hacked his way in was followed by a report from CBS News that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had sent out a bulletin to its employees last month warning them about a security “vulnerability” identified in Signal.

The truth, however, is much more interesting. If Signal has vulnerabilities, then China, Russia, and other U.S. adversaries suddenly have a new incentive to discover them. At the same time, the NSA urgently needs to find and fix any vulnerabilities quickly as it can—and similarly, ensure that commercial smartphones are free of backdoors—access points that allow people other than a smartphone’s user to bypass the usual security authentication methods to access the device’s contents ...

It’s common knowledge that the NSA’s mission is breaking into and eavesdropping on other countries’ networks ... But the organization has a secondary, complementary responsibility: to protect U.S. communications from others who want to spy on them. That is to say: While one part of the NSA is listening into foreign communications, another part is stopping foreigners from doing the same to Americans ...

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/28/signal-chat-leak-trump-technology-security-houthis-group-defense-nsa/

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2. Israeli officials furious over Signal Chat leak exposing sensitive intelligence

Written By Ravi Hari
29 Mar 2025, 07:46 PM IST

Israeli officials are expressing outrage over the leaked Signal chat involving senior Trump administration officials, as it contained sensitive intelligence provided by Israel to the US from a human source in Yemen, according to a report.

The disclosure, published by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, did put a human intelligence source at risk, a senior American intelligence official and a source familiar with Israel’s concerns told CBS News.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Israeli complaints regarding Mike Waltz, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, who inadvertently added Goldberg to the Signal chat. The chat, involving members of the National Security Council's principals committee, exchanged messages about potential strikes on Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen, who have launched attacks on Israel and shipping in the Red Sea ...

https://www.livemint.com/news/world/israeli-officials-furious-over-signal-chat-leak-exposing-sensitive-intelligence-report-11743256231585.html

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3. Signal chat flouted rules on classified intel, say former defense officials

Signal chat flouted rules on classified intel, say former defense officials

By Warren P. Strobel, Missy Ryan and Hannah Natanson

The Yemen attack timeline that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted to a Signal chat group would have been so highly classified, under Pentagon guidelines, that the details should have been restricted to a special, compartmented channel with its own code word and with access tightly limited, according to former Defense Department officials.

Hegseth and other senior Trump administration officials have denied that the data they shared in a Signal group, which included the timing of weapons strikes against Yemen’s Houthis and intelligence information shared by Israel on the whereabouts of a top Houthi operative, was classified.

“These are indeed highly detailed operational plans for war,” said one of the former officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. “Twenty-five years, I have never known them not to be classified. And usually this operational level of detail is further restricted to those with a need-to-know” ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/28/signal-leak-hegseth-espionage-classified/