They Ought To Be Fired

But Trump officials are trying to shift the blame and change the narrative.

Let’s talk briefly about the jaw-dropping scandal that remains the talk of Washington.

If you’re just getting up to speed, we learned on Monday that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz had created a chat group on Signal, which is a private, encrypted communications app. It included some of the top officials in the Trump administration, including himself, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance. The topic was a potential military strike on the Houthis in Yemen.

In creating the group, Waltz apparently inadvertently invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor in Chief of The Atlantic, to the chat. No one can explain yet how this happened. Goldberg himself at first understandably thought it was a hoax, or perhaps some kind of trap for the media. Because after all, it would be a stunning display of incompetence, stupidity and even illegality to make that kind of mistake.

But the longer the private thread went on, the more Goldberg understood that this was in fact a real chat, and he was somehow on it. A day after he broke the story, now that we’ve all had time to absorb just how shocking, irresponsible and, yes, criminal this Signal group was, we’ve also begun to understand how the administration is choosing to respond.

And it’s only deepening concerns.

Deny it happened, then attack the reporter

This is a White House that never owns up to its mistakes, especially its colossal ones, nor admits the truth even when confronted. And that made for some head-spinning moments for what some, in honor of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are calling “whiskeyleaks.”

“Nobody was texting war plans!” Hegseth insisted with a straight face. To his credit, Hegseth has years of experience lying to the public on Fox & Friends, and this is likely one of the reasons Trump picked him.

Hegseth made this claim of “no war plans” even though, per reporting by the Associated Press, the National Security Council admitted that the text chain described by Goldberg in The Atlantic “appears to be authentic.”

When asked how a reporter came to even be in a top secret chat group, Hegseth deployed his base media instincts again to go after the reporter’s reputation, as if that had anything to do with what had happened. He really could have been describing himself here: “So you are talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes,” Hegseth said, implying again that the story was untrue while attacking Goldberg personally.

The man who created the original f*ck-up, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, took the same approach even after the story was confirmed. Waltz even went on Fox to suggest that Goldberg had hacked into the system, rather than been directly invited by Waltz.

Fox’s Jesse Watters was busily trying to recast the scandal as a nothing burger, comparing this to when you “accidentally add the wrong person” to a chat group and they wind up seeing things they shouldn’t:

Watters similarly attacked Goldberg as “one of the biggest hoax artists around,” again suggesting that what happened didn’t really happen even though the White House has admitted it happened.

It was “hair on fire” with Hillary Clinton

It’s important to note that Waltz and Hegseth were some of the biggest critics of Hillary Clinton for having a private email server on which a handful of classified documents inadvertently exchanged hands.

Back in 2016, for example, Hegseth argued that if Hillary Clinton were any security professional, “military, government or otherwise,” she would be “fired on the spot” for what she did. By his own logic and argument, he also should be fired immediately for participating in the highly compromised group chat, which never should have happened outside of a secure government communication channel in the first place. Hegseth even claimed falsely during the text thread that they had “Operational Security” over the mission.

Hegseth further claimed back in 2016, “If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now... because the assumption is in the intelligence community, if you are using unclassified means, there is... likelihood that foreign governments are targeting those accounts.”

So… lock him up?

Waltz was no fan of Hillary Clinton either, no surprise there. At the time, Waltz blasted then National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan for sending top secret classified documents to Clinton’s private email while Sullivan was her deputy chief of staff and for getting “nothing, not even a slap on the wrist.”

By his logic, then, what should we do with a current National Security Advisor who accidentally invites an actual reporter from a national news organization to a top secret chat taking place on a private encrypted communications app?

At the very least, under their own arguments, both of these men should be fired for this serious, inexcusable breach of national security over discussing actual war plans operations on a non-government channel.

Men like Hegseth and Waltz were quick to condemn a political opponent for a minor breach of security protocols. But now they not only refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions but expect there to be zero consequences for their shockingly irresponsible disclosures and blatantly illegal use of a private messaging service.

The hypocrisy is starting to feel like the point.