The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
By Jeffrey Goldberg
It’s like an entire administration full of Rudy Giulianis. He had a history of butt-dialing and accidentally leaving unfortunate (for him) voice mails on reporter’s phones.
Post is constantly being deleted on Reddit. What is going on?
Yeah. Both on r/worldnews and r/europe. Not in smaller national subreddits though, where people are up in arms about the Europe comments. I don’t understand why Reddit would seek to censor these leaks, as they are already disseminated across the MSM everywhere.
You actually can’t make this shit up. WTF!
It’s absurd, it’s some shit you’d see in the movies
According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.
[This article reads like satire]
This is a government that tries to avoid accountability like the devil the holy water.
Trump is known to have violated the Presidential Records Act of 1978 numerous times, stating statesman-ish reasons like “I don’t care”. There is no reason that this got any better. More likely has he outsourced communications to other platforms, too, if only to avoid the PRA.
Musk thinks that whatever he does with DOGE is not subject to the FOIA in any way.
Michael Waltz, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and others use Signal instead of official, secure, and archieved messaging systems. Signal deletes such chats after a certain time, leaving no records for courts, Congress, and the archives that one day will open past reasonings for historic analysis.
So, what do they have to hide that they act like drug lords?
Even my work has better OPSEC on a random stupid meeting with nothing interesting. They review every attendee to make sure no one unexpected is in the chat.
It geniuely concerns me that this type of stuff doesn’t warrant a meeting or encrypted messaging.
The messaging was encrypted, they where using Signal. The dumb fuck just “accidentally” added the reporter to the group chat 😆
Saying singal is secure is actually a wild take. JS felt like this was a in person type of job.
I wonder if it was deliberate. Trump will surround himself with people like him, so they must constantly be knifing each other in the back
Oooh you’re right I never thought about it like they’re similar to the circle Stalin had.
Is it a coincidence that the person who wrote press release announcing Mike Waltz’s nomination is called Richard Goldberg, that he worked in previous Trump’s administration and is an expert on Iran/Houti? Did Waltz add Jeffrey Goldberg totally by accident or did he simply confuse the contacts?
elect fucking russian idiots , be surprised about the results
Just a reminder that they chose to use Signal for a reason, and those are also reasons we normal citizens should use Signal too! At least try and talk your closest relatives into dumping WhatsApp for it.
Yeah, this article was truly a fascinating read! The one thing that surprised me from Goldberg though, was that he continually questioned their use of signal. I mean, why wouldn’t they use it?
They could try to develop their own secure messaging app, but what would be the point of that when another already exists and they can verify the code is air tight because it’s open source. And, developing their own app would mean the possibility of relying on software that could contain unknown bugs or vulnerabilities.
The only safe cryptographic systems are open source ones.
Because they did so to avoid official channels which get log and recorded. And yes, the Pentagon has their own apps, what do you think? Yes, using signal is INSANE
Yes, they have some secure communications systems, but none that are safe to use on a mobile device. Signal is literally more advanced than what they’re using. It’s far from insane.
Signal is not safe for them to use. The pentagon issued a warning last year that Signal was not safe for non-public communications. Google also put out a threat alert about it more than a month ago.
One of the means used by Russia is crafting special QR codes, that take advantage of the Connected Devices feature, and sending them to users. If the user is tricked into scanning the code, then the hacker’s device will then be copied in on all of that user’s Signal messages. I wouldn’t trust any one of these people to be smart enough to recognize a phishing attempt like that. I would be surprised if one or more foreign powers weren’t also copied in on all these messages too.
It is beyond stupid for these people to be using an app like this for confidential or secret communications.
Are we missing an /s here? Signal is headquartered in the US, and here’s me pondering if they were actually using Telegram instead. Which would’ve been pretty apt.
I think at this point I’d be better off trying to use WeChat…
The headquarters are irrelevant. Signal is open source. Its academically dishonest to say they are insecure without pointing to why in the source.
Eh, I think that in the context handling classified information, it’s fair to say Signal is “insecure”, purely because anyone with a phone number can have an account, and can be accidentally added to sensitive conversations.
You know, like the exact thing that happened in this article.
Not that that’s Signal’s fault. But the fact that it’s even possible makes Singnal unusable for handling classified information.
Fair, but that is not what the comment I am replying to is saying. They are saying Signal is compromised for being based in the US.
Didn’t they try to charge Hilary Clinton for using an insecure private server?
This would matter if Republicans and their voters gave a shit about being hypocrites. That is not a new thing. Newt Gingrich went after Clinton for having an affair while he himself was having one for instance.
Newt Gingrich went after Clinton for having an affair…
I don’t want to disagree with your main point, I just want to say that this is a misstatement of what happened with Clinton. He was being sued for sexual harassment by Paula Jones in civil court. He was impeached for lying under oath and obstruction during that investigation.
The hinky part of it is that Kenneth Starr was originally supposed to be investigating whether the Clintons had participated in fraudulent real estate dealings. When that investigation turned up nothing, he was directed to look into Clinton’s testimony about his relationship with Lewinsky, which had nothing to do with the original investigation. It was a massive fishing expedition. At one point they had the FBI working with Lewinsky’s friend to secretly record her talking about the relationship.
Gingrich was worse. His wife at the time had cancer and he served her divorce papers while in the hospital and then left her and their child pennyless.
Christian love
Instead of mocking things as Christian that clearly aren’t (which includes pretty much everything I know about religion in the USA) we should remind those people what their values, their religion stand for. That’s far more likely to get them to change for the better.
I get what yours saying, but being hateful is what evangelical Christianity gas evolved to become. These are their values
It feels weird to say who was worse. Gingrich was worse to his wife for certain. Absolute monster of a husband and father. Clinton engaged in workplace sexual harassment as the president of the united states, and for some reason it took like 20 years for people to realize that lewinsky was his primary victim after spending years and years shaming her more than him.
Tbh I’d rather be sexually harassed in the workplace than get to the end of my life and realize that the person I had children with and wanted to grow old with didn’t give a flying fuck about me as a human being.
Not that either is good, but most of us understand that our bosses view as as resources. And if you’re raised female, you’re definitely aware of that dynamic.
Both sides are hypocrites. Remember Nancy Pelosi getting a haircut during Covid when regular people couldn’t? Or Gavin Newsom attending a birthday party during his own lockdown?
Let’s not both sides this shit. Yes, there are some corporate Democrats that are indeed hypocrites (I despise both Pelosi and Newsom) but Democrats have a mole hill while Republicans have a Denali sized problem with it.
Fascists are surprisingly bad at war.
They’re bad at lots of things. Stupidity is a highly transferable skill.
