There was no reason to expect competence by the Trump administration’s security officials. Experts expected things to go wrong.
Top national security officials in the new administration, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, texted war plans for military strikes in Yemen in a group chat on Signal Messenger, an app that accidentally included Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
This was so bad that the usually whatever-Trump-and-his-people-do-is-okay Republicans, including the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, signed a letter to the acting inspector general at the Department of Defense asking for an inquiry into the “use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information.”
Let us look first at the situation of inspector generals. Inspectors general are tasked with finding waste, fraud, abuse and misconduct in the federal agencies. They would monitor the President’s agencies and appointees.
During the first week of his administration, Trump purged the government of experienced inspector generals, firing many of them and replacing them with people whose primary background is not necessarily experience with the position or the issues but loyalty to Trump.
This abrupt action by Trump is probably illegal, as the Inspector General Act requires the President to notify Congress 30 days before the removal of an inspector general and requires a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons.”
Back to the group chat. In February, national security officials were warned that the app Signal was vulnerable to attack. A special bulletin from the National Security Agency warned of a security vulnerability in the app. It warned that platforms like Signal were “permitted by policy for unclassified accountability/recall exercises” but were NOT “approved to process or store nonpublic unclassified information.”
Eighteen people, an unseemly large number, were on the chat call. They included the Secretary of the Treasury and the Deputy Treasury Secretary. Why were they on the call?
Steven Witkoff was on the chat call, perhaps for good reason, as he is the special envoy to the Middle East. However, he was in Russia, in the Kremlin for a meeting with Putin, when he joined the chat. Remember, the NSA had warned that the app was unsafe.
When Trump appointed Witkoff, a real estate developer with no government or foreign policy experience, it prompted “head-scratching” in diplomatic circles.
The top person on that fateful group chat was the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who exemplifies the reason for the head-scratching about his nomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate Republicans.
Hegseth is a former FOX News program co-host, with no experience that qualifies him to be Secretary of Defense. He never managed anything of significance, let alone an agency like the Department of Defense, which has 3.4 million service members and civilians, an $841.4 billion budget, and is spread across 4,800 sites in over 160 countries.
Fox News colleagues and others accused Hegseth of drinking on the job. Further, he is a well-known opponent of women serving in the military, when nearly 18 percent of the active duty personnel are females.
As Secretary, he is breaching security in several ways, including using a forbidden app and bringing his wife to secret security meetings when she does not have security clearances.
Further, while he is supposedly pushing against DEI and so-called anti-merit employment decisions, Hegseth hired his younger brother to an influential position at the Pentagon despite his lack of relevant background.
Tulsi Gabbard was one of the crucial figures in this group chat. As the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), she heads the intelligence community and serves as the principal intelligence adviser to the President, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council. She also oversees and coordinates the efforts of the 18 intelligence agencies, including the CIA, NSA, FBI intelligence branch, and military intelligence units.
She does not have the experience for this position. According to congressional mandate, the DNI or the deputy should either be a military officer or “have, by training or experience, an appreciation of military intelligence activities and requirements.”
Her nomination was problematic as she often criticized the nation’s intelligence agencies with talking points used by Russia and expressed sympathy for Putin’s arguments for waging war in Ukraine. She also cozied up to Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s now-deposed dictator. But Gabbard, Hegseth, and others are loyal to Trump. That seems to be all that matters.
Amateur hour is a dangerous game being played on all of us.