Once again, we find ourselves having an anguished debate about mobile phones and online safety, in this case asking: should we ban the devices for US national security advisers under the age of 60? Do you know what your national security adviser is doing on his device? Is he using it to stay in touch with other guys in the big-man-osphere to talk about bombing Hooters? Or did he maybe add the editor-in-chief of a leading general interest magazine to a Signal group in the crucial hours running up to a highly sensitive US military operation in Yemen, seemingly committing so many alleged crimes that he should have a full-body orange jumpsuit tattooed on him for ever?
By now, you will have caught up with the tale of one of the most idiotic breaches of security imaginable – executed, regrettably, by the actual US national security adviser. Mike Waltz seems to have been aided and abetted in his full-spectrum fatuity by other ultra-senior figures, including the vice-president, JD Vance, and the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who shared detailed operational and strategic information in a chat to which Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally invited. Is Hegseth OK? Has he returned to being – how to put this delicately? – someone you probably don’t want to give important tasks to “after lunch”?
On another tangent, meanwhile, was there some extremely senior military or government official with either the first name Jeffrey, or the second name Goldberg, whom Waltz actually meant to add? And did that intended Jeffrey or Goldberg wake up the next day, see the Yemen news, and feel a deeply wounded sense of Fomo? “Wait, you guys bombed Yemen without me? I hate you ALL. I demand you put me in the group chat NOW, just so I can immediately flounce off and leave the group chat.”
The breach exposes so many things that it is difficult to know where to start. It certainly highlights the almost immeasurably rich lexicon of emojis. You realise that a certain type of guy deploys the same three emojis for taking out a Houthi target as they would if Bryson DeChambeau nailed a slightly tricky putt on the 14th at the West Palm Beach Pro-Am. Punching fist, USA flag, flames emoji. Let’s GO, Bryson!
That said, the emojis are obviously the best of it. Less easy to scroll past is the bit where Vance, or his proxy, says: “I just hate bailing out Europe again.” Then Hegseth replies: “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.” Mm. Three weeks ago, we had Vance offering a blanket disparagement of European forces as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. Now we have this Signal chat – yet another sweet memorial to all the European service personnel who gave their lives in the US Republican party’s endlessly stupid 9/11 wars. We never asked to be reimbursed for that military assistance – very BAD! very Wrong! – and are now repeatedly hearing that it meant nothing to Marine-adjacent shutterbug Vance, who remains the most unbearably loud and rude American at the luxury hotel breakfast. They really should make a darkly satirical TV show about these absurd, degenerate, unpleasant people. Call it The White Potus.
Needless to say, the first instinct of the Trump administration has been to insult the journalist, when in less responsible hands than Goldberg’s this could have been catastrophically endangering information for involved US service personnel and intelligence operatives. At time of writing, Hegseth’s sole comment on the bed he and the guys just shat was to attack the man to whom they personally served this scoop, calling Goldberg “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist”. Is he though? Come on, Pete! Given the same information in real time, your boy Joe Rogan would have livestreamed it and you know it. At least Donald Trump would have been up to speed with it that way. “I don’t know anything about it,” was the president’s sleepy verdict yesterday, a day he spent wetting his pants about some oil painting of him hanging somewhere in the Colorado state legislature.
As for consequences, do please remember that we are dealing with the biggest hypocrites on the planet. Consider their own thunderous statements on infosec. Here is the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, just last week: “If you have a private that loses a sensitive item, that loses night vision goggles, that loses a weapon, you can bet that that private is going to be held accountable. The same and equal standards must apply to senior military leaders.” Also last week, here is Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard: “Any unauthorised release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.” Was Tulsi on the Signal chat? Course she was! If you still want more, here’s Hegseth mining the seemingly endless potential of Hillary Clinton’s careless use of a private server for classified information back when he was a Fox News host: “If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now.” “When I’m president of the United States, neither she nor any of these other people are going to be above the law,” was the previous verdict of one Marco Rubio, last seen on the Houthi chat appearing in the role of secretary of state of the United States.
We’ll have to wait and see if these clowns will hold themselves to their own very high standards. In the meantime, please enjoy European diplomats declaring that as far as the relationship between the continent and the US goes, this is “the writing on the wall”. If only it HAD been written on a wall – that would actually have been more secure and secretive. Come to that, it would genuinely have been more secure and secretive to hire a skywriting plane. Great job, guys! Punching fist, USA flag, flames emoji, etc.
- Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
