Summary
Lawmakers from both parties expressed outrage after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief revealed he was accidentally included in a Trump administration Signal chat discussing Yemen airstrikes.
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) called for investigations and firings, labeling it a serious security breach.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) criticized the use of non-secure systems, warning that adversaries like Russia and China could exploit it.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) condemned the administration’s mishandling of classified information, saying it endangers national security.
Make it happen Senate. It’s literally your job. So fucking do it
That’s bad and all, but: They are using Signal?!
Yes, what of it? Technically signal is fine from a security/leakage angle. Obviously not from a “govt communications” / public records angle, but there neither is direct verbal comms.
Presumably to get around FOIA requests?
With a journalist in the group there’s no need for FOI requests. Think of the money saved!
It practically pays for itself!
But her emails!!!
“Every accusation is a confession”
🧈🚹
…that’s Lenny tho
Yes, and Squiggy.
I feel like David Lander was the more popular of the 2 back in the day, but I’ve seen Michael Mckean show up in more things after. I wonder if he found it hard to shake that character? … or if I didn’t watch the right stuff
I always thought they just liked buttery males.
They didn’t really care about her emails with that statement, it was her pronoun which was the problem they were crying about.
I’d say 50/50 because she’s a woman and a Democrat.
Good thing she never wore a tan suit or used the wrong mustard, then Republicans would have done something drastic like storm the Capitol building!
I mean, her politics are also pretty shit.
Just, the shit parts they likely agree with.
They actually love a War Hawk like Clinton, they just hate admitting it because, exactly, she’s a woman and a Democrat.
You only got yourselves to blame. If you’re actively destroying OPSEC you have no reason to fucking cry.
The only person in real danger here is the journalist.
And the yemenis but they’ve got the wrong skin tone for anybody to even mention. Genocide is completely normalized.
Imagine that. You have unqualified amateurs in important government positions, and they don’t know what they’re doing.
But they claim that they know better than the actual experts they displace
Cue schumer saying that we shouldn’t be hasty and should focus on bipartisan bills instead.
Nah, this is the kind of thing that gets Democrat leadership animated: stuff that barely affects voters.
The so-called experts on Trump over at the Atlantic wrote a long and boring article on my cellphone usage that is so incorrect I do not have time here to correct it. I only use Government Phones, and have only one seldom used government cell phone. Story is soooo wrong!
–@RealDonaldTrump
It’s hard to tell whether this is whether this is real or not… im going to lean not, due to the low amount of misused capitals.
You obviously have never heard or read anything by trump
He’s far more stupid and unreadable
Replace Atlantic with NY Times, and this one is real: https://www.thetrumparchive.com/?searchbox="government+phones"
Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit…
Side note: does anyone else find it weird that emphatic “too” has two o’s but emphatic “so” does not?
Way too coherent… this is FAKE NEWS!
Way too coherent to be real.
And yet it is 95% real.
Also, he refused to use a government phone in his first term.
Literally.
Devil’s Advocate Hot Take:
This is an expression of power. An intentional leak to show that “We get to break rules, and you cannot.” We see it as incompetence and abject hypocrisy, but it could be a purposeful leak because they don’t care about being seen as hypocrites, they are about *showing us they can get away with it.
/takes off tinfoil hat
I really think they really are just this stupid, but I think its at least worthwhile to consider the alternative, because a lot of what conservatives do is about using hypocrisy as a weapon and expression of power over others. They want us getting angry about such things, so they can can be cool and collected and say that we’re overreacting because they’re so calm while chuckling and sneering at us.
“But her emails!” Yeah they don’t actually give a shit, they may just want to show they can get away with it. Much like Trump rejecting using a government issued cell phone in his first term and Bush “losing” millions of emails.
This is an expression of power. An intentional leak to show that “We get to break rules, and you cannot.”
Hanlon’s razor applies I think:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence or stupidity”
I really think they really are just this stupid
Yep. They fired all the adults that think things through and provide rigor for a reason so the only people left are children doing whatever they want ignorant of the consequences.
No I’d say there’s absolutely a good share of malice in the mix with incompetence and stupidity.
Exactly. If they had wanted to intentionally leak classified information in order to move the overton window or something, they would have done it differently. They wouldn’t have had the VP disagreeing with Trump. They wouldn’t have actually leaked serious classified information, including the name of an active CIA officer. They wouldn’t have leaked it to the editor in chief of the Atlantic.
They fired all the adults that think things through and provide rigor for a reason so the only people left are children doing whatever they want ignorant of the consequences.
For example, they fired anyone who would otherwise have said “Folks, this is not an appropriate communications tool for classified information. This needs to be shared in a SCIF”.
Anybody who knows better also knows to keep their mouth shut if they want to keep their job in this admin. And even if keeping their job isn’t their priority, they know that if they speak up they risk being scapegoated, hung out to dry, and possibly killed by MAGA loyalists for daring to confront the king.
As long as we’re putting on our tinfoil hats, it’s also possible that this was an intentional action taken against The Atlantic (or against Jeffrey Goldberg in particular). Trump’s admin has plenty of reasons to want to silence that publication, and might’ve hoped that by “accidentally” giving Goldberg access, they could entrap him into committing a crime (mishandling of classified material, espionage, etc).
With a little cooperation from the AG’s office, presto! You’ve got one of your biggest critics in jail, and sent a message to other would-be whistleblowers.
Reminds me of this from the Bush II years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
The Killian documents controversy (also referred to as Memogate or Rathergate) involved six documents containing false allegations about President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73, allegedly typed in 1973. Dan Rather presented four of these documents as authentic in a 60 Minutes II broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004, less than two months before the 2004 presidential election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate them. Several typewriter and typography experts soon concluded that they were forgeries. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett provided the documents to CBS, but he claims to have burned the originals after faxing them copies.
Anyway, interesting and worthwhile thing to consider.
It’s the Russian way. Everyone knows things are shitty but everyone also feels powerless about it. Learned helplessness as a political strategy and the basis for a society.
Pretty good take. I agree they actually are this dumb, but not everyone involved is necessarily, so it’s wise to be aware of alternatives such as what you suggest.
There is exactly one political party that cares about hypocrisy.
And it ain’t the Republicans.
The first part is purely conjecture of their intent. It is irrelevant and unknowable. The facts are they leaked this to a reporter. They should be held accountable based on the facts, not their intent.
Being dumb is the meta rn
Sure. Outraged over an inadvertent leak, but totally fine arming a country committing genocide, trying to strong-arm the victim of relentless aggression into giving up 1/5th of it’s territory, letting disease spread freely in the nation, detaining people without charges, kidnapping people off the streets and deporting then to violent foreign prisoners without due process, weakening our defense industry, alienating every ally and partner we have on the planet, threatening to annex countries, starting trade wars, taking away women’s healthcare, threatening the most vulnerable members of society, etc etc etc. All that other stuff is fine, but sure, let’s raise holy hell over an inadvertent leak.
Heh. Same happened in Sweden some time back, but on a less serious issue, where a journalist was invited to a emergency meeting for the Liberal party over Signal.
As a Democratic Leader I think we should EXCUSE this Leaking of Top Secret War Information and INSTEAD Focus on HER EMAILS to win BACK Democratic Voters!
Oh, so they’re upset now? What about, you know, when Trump stole a shit-ton of top secret documents that he very probably attempted to sell and at the very least definitely stored improperly and used a lot of lying and juggling to keep hold of? After he attempted to overthrow the government on Jan 6th. If they had moved faster, we wouldn’t even be having this whine-fest, because he wouldn’t have gotten re-elected from prison.
If this is the thing that makes people realize Trump and his cronies are fucking idiots, despite all the other evidence we already have, I’ll take it.
I think what may make this different from that is chuds could see the fact that their king did whatever he wanted with those top secret documents as his right.
This was incompetently handled active war planning. This can and should spook even those chuds
I read the Axios piece and skimmed the Atlantic original. This is some next level incompetence from this administration. It’s bad enough that I actually hope that it’s intentional as some kind of dick wagging move.
