Trump Text Fiasco Worsens as Brutal Details Wreck Fox Spin

 

Transcript: Trump Text Fiasco Worsens as Brutal Details Wreck Fox Spin

An interview with Rosa Brooks, an expert in national security law, about what the latest developments in the Signalgate scandal really reveal—and how they demolish MAGA's spin about it.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

We’re now in day two of the fallout from the stunning news that President Trump’s most senior national security officials allowed a journalist onto a highly sensitive discussion of war plans. Fox News figures are out in force denying wildly that anything at all is amiss. Yet under questioning from Senate Democrats, numerous Trump administration figures all but admitted that something very deeply amiss really had happened, wrecking the pro-Trump spin. For instance, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was pressed on whether the information was classified, she passed the buck to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Gabbard evaded wildly on other fronts as well, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe made some striking admissions too. We’re going to try to unravel all of this today with Rosa Brooks, an expert in national security law who held a senior policy adviser role at the Pentagon during the Obama presidency. Rosa, thank you so much for coming on.

Rosa Brooks: My pleasure, Greg.

Sargent: The Trump administration is now under heavy fire over the news that The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was included on the chat between Defense Secretary Hegseth, DNI Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director Ratcliffe, and many others. They were talking on Signal about their upcoming plans to bomb Yemen’s Houthis and shared a number of sensitive operational details. Rosa, before we dive into the specifics, what’s your general sense of where the story is right now? It seems to have caught fire in a new way. It’s not dying down. Your reading?

Brooks: This is a stunning, stunning story. And I think the rest of us are all just feeling hurt that Mike Waltz didn’t add us to the Signal chat. I know Mike Waltz, and I’m going to write him a note saying, Next time you disclose classified information, I’d really like to be in the loop too. It’s stunning because (1) they accidentally included a journalist in a discussion of targeting war plans, (2) they were having this discussion on Signal, a commercial app, and not on existing secure U.S. government channels, which they’re supposed to be using if they’re discussing classified information, and (3) imminent plans to bomb a target are, of course, classified. How could they not be, unless the president just announced we’re going to start bombing tonight? Of course, they’re classified. But if they’re so convinced that nothing is classified, they can demonstrate that by telling Jeff Goldberg to go ahead and release the transcript of the entire chat, which he saved because he is a journalist. And unlike them, he apparently believes in record retention, which the government officials are supposed to believe in.

This is so criminally careless on every level. That leads me to number four. This, of course, is what the Republicans were beating up Hillary Clinton about—a much lesser lapse—for years: about her emails, her use of a private email server. As far as I know, Hillary Clinton was not actually discussing classified war plans. My vocabulary is failing me [in terms of] the number of ways to say that this was criminally irresponsible, probably illegal, and in any normal universe, would have led to immediate resignations across the executive branch.

Sargent: Well, to one of your points, I want to play some audio from the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, grilled Gabbard hard, asking pointedly if the information was classified. She says it wasn’t. Then this happened.

Angus King (audio voiceover): What if that had been made public that morning before the attack took place?

Tulsi Gabbard (audio voiceover):  Senator, I can attest to the fact that there were no classified or intelligence equities that were included in that chat group at any time. And I defer ...

King (audio voiceover): The attack sequencing and timing and weapons and targets you don’t consider should have been classified, or were classified?

Gabbard (audio voiceover): I defer to the secretary of defense, the National Security Council on that question.

King (audio voiceover): Well, you’re the head of...You’re the head of the intelligence community. You’re supposed to know about classifications. So your testimony very clearly today is that nothing was in that set of texts that were classified. I’ll follow up on Senator Wyden’s question. If that’s the case, please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion.

Sargent: Rosa, we know that operational details were in fact in the texts, as Goldberg has said. And in fact, Gabbard admits straight out under questioning from Senator Mark Kelly elsewhere that there was discussion of military targets in general. And Ratcliffe also admitted to that. Rosa, what do you make of those exchanges?

Brooks: It’s hard to take anything she’s saying seriously because of course she knows what was said in that Signal chat, and of course she can tell the difference. Or I would hope to God that as the director of national intelligence that she has a basic understanding of what kinds of information tends to be classified and what kind isn’t. And the notion that she would go, Oh gee whiz, well, I don’t know, I guess you’d have to ask the secretary of defense whether this is classified.... If she doesn’t know then she is not qualified for her job, and if she does know then she is part of an egregious security breach.

Sargent: I think there’s no question about it. She was clearly totally flummoxed and didn’t know what to say. I want to move to Fox News for a second. Fox’s top propagandists all have spun wildly about this. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters documented, Laura Ingraham blamed the prominence of the story on left-wing networks. And on her show, Senator Josh Hawley laughably tried to dismiss this as “griping about who is on a text message and who is not.” Jesse Watters tried to laugh it off, saying, “Did you ever try to start a group text? It’s hard.” And Sean Hannity claimed that the media just wants to distract from Trump’s supposed accomplishments, and he called the media “state-run.” I think he maybe forgot, Rosa, that the state is actually in the hands of Trump and his allies right now. But that aside, this spin seems almost desperate to me. What do you think?

Brooks: Oh, sure. Yeah, we all, and we absolute can, empathize with adding the wrong person to a group chat. Of course we can—which is why if you are the director of national intelligence, secretary of defense, and the national security adviser, you are not supposed to discuss war plans in a text group chat over commercial app. Duh, right? That is why you’re supposed to do it in a SCIF, a secure compartmentalized information facility. That’s why, if you’re doing audio or video calls, you’re supposed to be using secure audio and video technologies that are run and maintained by the government. That’s why you have 16 tedious layers of double-checking of everything before you have those conversations. Yes, it’s a pain in the butt, but the whole point of all of those boring procedures are to make sure that you don’t do exactly what they did do. So saying, Boy, it’s confusing to start a group chat? Yes, that’s the point. That’s why you don’t do this stuff over group chats

Sargent: That certainly seems inarguable to me the way you said it. I want to try to get at something, though. What is the chain of command here? It seems that the national security adviser Mike Waltz set this thing up. Is that how these things happen? In a situation where a bunch of the most senior people in the administration wants to deliberate about something like this, what is supposed to happen there?

Brooks: No. So it’s certainly common that the national security adviser would be the person to say, Hey, everybody, we have a decision that’s on the table. Maybe we have a proposal from one agency, but other agencies have equities, so we should discuss this. Or we have a decision. Or the president has raised this question, he’s asked for advice or he’s asked for an opinion on what to do here, so I want to bring everybody together in a Principals Committee. Essentially, they were doing what is typically called a Principals Committee meeting. And the principals are typically the cabinet secretaries; the deputies level are the people just beneath them. You have principals meetings, you have deputies meetings, and so forth. So that in itself is normal.

And I am, in fact, glad that they were at least having some discussion and that it’s not just Pete Hegseth goes off in a corner and bombs people without checking in with anybody beforehand. I appreciate that. That piece of it is normal process. The piece of it that is not normal process, as we’ve been discussing, is to do this over a commercial app in which you’ve accidentally included a journalist. Another piece that is troubling is it’s not really clear what people like Steve Miller are doing in that conversation—but that’s a whole other story.

Sargent: So what should have happened? In a normal administration, what would have happened?

Brooks: In a normal administration, what would have happened is that through secure channels, the national security adviser would have made all of the other principals aware through their staffs that he wanted to convene a Principals Committee meeting, which can be done virtually. All these people have classified mobile devices. Typically, any senior national security officials such as the secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence will have a home SCIF in their home. If they’re traveling, they can use a SCIF at an American embassy—most consulates and embassies have SCIFs, secure rooms for this purpose and secure video conferencing and audio facilities and so forth.

Part of the reason that you want to be ideally in a SCIF, even if you’re using a classified mobile device, is you don’t want to be, for instance, texting away on your classified mobile device at your kid’s little league game with a bunch of people looking over your shoulder or dictating your message into your classified device. [You don’t want to be] in a setting in which either the person sitting next to you or someone with a long-range microphone can pick up what you’re saying or [someone with] a long-range camera can see your screen.

It’s not just about the device itself, it’s about how you are connecting. Are you using commercial software that has not been vetted by the U.S. government to connect to that conference that you’re having, whether it’s by text or audio or video? You don’t want to be in a place where eavesdroppers or those with zoom lenses and so on can see what you’re doing. And we the United States, the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense of all people, know exactly how good U.S. surveillance technologies are, and exactly how good the surveillance technologies of U.S. adversaries—state adversaries such as Russia and China—are. You don’t need to be sitting next to somebody in the little league game in order to see their screen. Our satellite camera technologies are good enough that sometimes you can see that literally from the sky.

Normally, there are secure places to go to have that level of conversation. And is it an inconvenience? You bet it’s an inconvenience, but that’s why these folks get paid the big bucks as it were.

Sargent: You’d think. I want to go back to the Senate hearing for a sec because there was another set of exchanges that really underscores your point. It involves Senator Mark Kelly and DNI Gabbard and CIA Chief Ratcliffe. Here’s what happened.

Mark Kelly (audio voiceover): The deliberation as to whether or not we should launch a strike on another country—would you consider that classified information, Ms. Gabbard?

Gabbard (audio voiceover): Well, the information was not classified.

Kelly (audio voiceover): This is ... This is not ... I’m not talking about this. I’m just talking about deliberation from principals as to whether or not we should launch a strike on another country. Would you consider that classified information? I’m not talking about what happened this week.

Gabbard (audio voiceover): There are other factors that would go into determining that classification.

Kelly (audio voiceover): Mr. Ratcliffe, the deliberation between principals in our national security apparatus about whether or not to strike another country—would you consider that to be classified information?

John Ratcliffe (audio voiceover): Pre-decisional strike deliberation should be conducted through classified channels.

Sargent: Rosa, Ratcliffe straight up admits there that this should never have happened. That absolutely destroys Fox News’s spin about this. This also reinforces the broader point here, which is that this has just occurred entirely outside of any legible or even remotely grounded process, right?

Brooks: Yeah. Absolutely. They’re contradicting themselves all over the place. The White House did confirm the authenticity of the chat. On the one hand, they’re saying, Well, it’s authentic, but it wasn’t classified, but can Jeff Goldberg release the transcript? No, we wouldn’t want that to happen. Well, if it’s not classified, they should let him release it. If it’s classified, they should admit it’s classified, and they should fix this. If anyone else had been involved in this, good God. Can you imagine Joe Biden doing this? Can you imagine anyone in the Biden administration doing this? We know what happened with Hillary Clinton. We know what a big deal her emails were. This would be instant firings. Instant firings here.

They’re now trying to claim that it was a staff person who somehow mysteriously added Jeff Goldberg. I don’t believe they’ve released the name of this supposed staff person, but the buck stops with the principals. And again, I don’t know how many times and how many ways we can say this: This is why you do not do this stuff over a commercial app with no process. This is why you use the tried-and-true processes to safeguard that kind of conversation against eavesdropping: because you don’t want a situation where ... I don’t know, what is Mike Waltz doing? Handing his phone to somebody and say, Oh hey, you set up the group chat, I’m not going to bother to take a look at it and even check? You can’t confirm the identity of people on Signal. There’s no way to do that. You can’t authenticate it. That’s why you’re not supposed to use Signal for this kind of conversation.

Sargent: Again, sounds inarguable to me. And concerning this, this effort by them to pin it on some unnamed supposedly existing staffer, Politico reports, according to a source very close to the White House, “everyone in the White House can agree on one thing, Mike Waltz is a effing idiot.” Now, I don’t know whether Mike Waltz is an idiot or not; but judging by what you’re saying about the process, this is somebody who really should have known what should have been done here. And he’s probably someone who should be fired for this, right?

Brooks: Every single person on that group chat should have known better. Every single person. I do know Mike Waltz. He’s not an idiot. I think this is an issue of humans.... He’s not an idiot more than humans in general are idiots. I don’t think you will find a human being who has worked for any executive branch who hasn’t, at some point or another, screwed up and used the wrong device or whatever. It happens because people are human; they forget and they’re in a hurry and they do stuff that if they had thought about it a little more they would go, Oh shoot, I shouldn’t have done that.

But the many layers of fuck-ups involved here, and the fact that it involved every single principal level national security leader in the Trump administration.... This wasn’t one person with a brief onetime lapse for one thing. I don’t think we know how many people were part of that group total together—we know a number of the participants, but not all of them—but not a single one of them said, Oh, guys, we should not be doing this over this channel or guys, we can’t authenticate who is on this chat. That is the really mind-blowing piece. And it raises the question: What else are they doing in a slipshod manner? What else are they doing in a half-assed manner? What else are they doing in an insecure manner?

And we haven’t talked about the actual damage to U.S. interests. If you’re an ally of the U.S., you’re not sharing intelligence with the U.S. anymore because they’re going to be criminally negligent with the information you shared. The Jeffrey Goldberg article in The Atlantic suggests that among other things, they used the identities of human intelligence assets and referred specifically to other intelligence methods and assets as well as weapon systems, as well as named targets. If you’re a U.S. ally, you’re not going to share intelligence with us.

Sargent: OK, Rosa, I’ve saved the best for last. It’s Trump’s latest response to this whole thing. He’s sitting there with Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, and he does this almost rote gesture of slapping Mike Waltz on the wrist so gently, it’s almost incredible. And then Mike Waltz says, Of course, we’re going to keep the network secure, sir. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): I think it’s something you should look into.

Michael Waltz (audio voiceover): Yes, sir, we are. We have our technical experts looking at it. We have our legal teams looking at it. And of course, we’re going to keep everything as secure as possible. No one in your national security team would ever put anyone in danger. And as you’ve said, and we’ve repeatedly said, the attack was phenomenal, and it’s ongoing. But the media wants to talk about everything else except for the hostages you’re getting out of the Middle East, Iran on its back foot, sea lanes getting reopened, peace in Europe. As we just saw today with the Black Sea ceasefire, we were just on with Steve Witkoff, myself, our team in Saudi Arabia. They want to talk about all this other stuff except for your amazing successes and the successes of your team.

Sargent: So Rosa, there it all is. Mike Waltz knows better than anyone that the way to avoid accountability in Trump’s eyes is to praise the audience of one. And he just did it as unctuously and obsequiously as you possibly can imagine. This is not what we want in a leader at times like this. Is it?

Brooks: Oh, Mr. President, you are very handsome and so very brilliant. Look, that’s the way Trump operates. We know that he will jettison people who he thinks are being critical of him. Mike Waltz knows which side his bread is buttered on. Honestly, although I think, as I said earlier, that in any normal universe, Mike Waltz would have resigned yesterday, I almost hope he won’t because the people waiting in the wings behind Mike Waltz are a lot worse than Mike Waltz. This was careless to the point of criminal negligence, but Mike Waltz is not a raving lunatic. And frankly, some of the folks in Trump’s orbit are raving lunatics. I would rather have Mike Waltz as national security adviser than almost all the possible alternatives in Trumpworld right now.

And I would love to think that this, however, would be the tipping point in terms of Republicans in Congress and their willingness to themselves just be obsequious and kowtow to Trump. I would like to believe that at least some of those Republicans in Congress do care about American national security, even if they don’t care about much of anything else, but I think that the perfect, perfect two months that President Trump is boasting of—and that Mike Waltz is telling him he’s just had—suggests that the only thing perfect about it has been the perfect obsequiousness of Republicans in Congress. I’d like to believe that this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for Republicans in Congress in terms of willing to say on every possible level, in every possible way, Woah, Donald, you’re going too far, stop. But given the total lack of spine that Republicans in Congress have shown thus far, I’m not getting my hopes up.

Sargent: Rosa, I think it’s going to have to get much, much, much worse for anything like that to happen. And unfortunately, I think it is going to get much, much, much worse. Rosa Brooks, thank you so much for coming on with us today.

Brooks: My pleasure.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.

The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent

Trump’s Angry Rant over Hegseth Fiasco Makes Scandal Worse

 

Transcript: Trump’s Angry Rant over Hegseth Fiasco Makes Scandal Worse

An interview with national security lawyer Bradley Moss, who explains why the stunning exposure of highly sensitive war-planning texts might have been unlawful—and reveals Trump as a disastrously failed leader.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

By now you may have heard that President Trump’s most senior officials discussed war plans on Signal, and that the group chat actually included Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Goldberg published his findings, and it caused an explosion in Washington with many Democrats calling for an investigation, and even the occasional Republican slamming this as an unacceptable security breach. President Trump was asked about this, and shockingly he claimed not to know anything about it. What struck us though is what Trump didn’t say. He failed to say that he’s going to get to the bottom of this mess, and that it should have never happened. Today, we’re trying to dig through all this with the perfect guest, veteran national security lawyer Bradley Moss. Brad, thanks for coming on, man.

Bradley Moss: Absolutely, any time.

Sargent: National security adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and some others were talking on Signal about their upcoming plans to bomb Yemen’s Houthis to open up shipping in the Red Sea. Somehow, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got included. The top officials argued a bit about the plans, and then soon after Hegseth openly shares operational details about the move itself, about the operation itself. Can you lay out what happened here, Brad?

Moss: This is the movie Idiocracy come to life. This is just completely reckless. So, to be clear, what we know so far is that on the commercially available Signal encrypted chat platform, which everybody and anybody in D.C. uses, these various senior officials were discussing a number of things regarding the upcoming attacks they were gonna launch against the Houthis. And what originally looked like a set of policy discussions quickly devolved into extensive details about how these attacks would take place, by what units, what locations, what the government knew about foreign entities. It demonstrated nothing less than complete disregard for the very nature of secure communications.

These are officials who are trusted with some of the most sensitive secrets the U.S. government has, who serve in some of the most sensitive positions within the U.S. government with all kinds of authority and leverage and discretion, and they are acting like 14-year-old children on this chat, thumping their chest and sending emojis back and forth the way my teenage daughter does.

Sargent: Well, Brad, I want to ask you: It’s common enough, as you said, for top officials to communicate via Signal about certain things, but is it typical for the country’s top national security officials to talk this way on Signal about extremely sensitive military operations as well as the complicated considerations that go into them? The Signal app isn’t an approved channel for such communications, is it? How serious a breach is this?

Moss: This could be a very significant breach if for no other reason than that it’s a commercial platform. It’s not controlled by the U.S. government. Other foreign governments almost certainly have tried to breach it and steal information from it. It is absolutely not authorized for any type of classified discussion.

There’s two legal concerns that a lot of us have right now. There is the more benign and more simplistic one from an archival standpoint, which is these are all senior officials who are all subject to the Federal Records Act and, to a lesser extent, the Presidential Records Act, who have to document everything that happens for historical purposes, for the government archives and documents, for future historians, for accountability, for oversight purposes. So that’s one issue. That’s the civil archival issue.

The separate one, the more concerning one is potential criminal liability. These discussions—we don’t know the full extent of what was in these texts because even Jeffrey Goldberg, who is under no obligation to redact classified information, withheld those details because it concerned him as an American to think of that type of detail being put out in the public venue. If those details are in fact classified, if we assume for the sake of argument that Goldberg didn’t totally misinterpret it, it is a significant and serious breach of classified protocols, of criminal law, and it exposed all this information to being stolen by other entities.

And it raises questions. This is just the one chat we know about. What other chats are there? What other threads are there that the director of national intelligence, the attorney general are on, where they’re discussing plans to deport alleged members of Tren de Aragua? What other types of sensitive U.S. government details are on Signal, and what, if anything, is being done to ensure these officials keep that in approved classified channels?

Sargent: That brings me to the next point here: what Donald Trump had to say about this. He was asked about it, and here’s what happened.

Reporter (audio voiceover): Your reaction to the story from The Atlantic that said that some of your top cabinet officials and aides had been discussing very sensitive material through Signal and they included in an Atlantic reporter for that? What is your response to that?

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?

Reporter (audio voiceover): They were using Signal to coordinate on sensitive materials—

Trump (audio voiceover): Having to do with what? Having to do with what? What were they talking about?

Reporter (audio voiceover): —with the Houthis.

Trump (audio voiceover): The Houthis, you mean the attacker, the Houthis?

Reporter (audio voiceover): That’s correct.

Trump (audio voiceover): Well, it couldn’t have been very effective because the attack was very effective, I can tell you that. I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time.

Sargent: Brad, note that Trump’s immediate instinct is to be angry at The Atlantic for reporting this, not to wonder whether it’s actually true or why it happened, or to say that he’s going to get to the bottom of it and fix any problems that led to this mess. Everything is always about whether something is embarrassing to him. This is not what he should be focused on. It’s not ideal to have a megalomaniac like this in charge in such situations. What do you make of that, Brad?

Moss: Yeah, you have to feel bad for poor Donald Trump. He is the last person in this government to ever know anything. It’s always the I know nothing about it, I didn’t hear anything about it, you’re all fake news, you’re the enemy of the people response. And that’s what you saw here. Just as you noted, his initial concern wasn’t, This is really concerning to me as the commander in chief and the ultimate classification authority. I’m going to personally look into this to make sure that my appointees, my cabinet officials are complying with the law. And if they’re not, I will take action because I am the ultimate decider of national security protocols. No. All he knew to do was to attack The Atlantic and say, I know nothing else, because that’s who Donald Trump is. Accountability, laws, procedures—those only apply to other people. They don’t ever apply to Donald Trump.

Sargent: Exactly right. We should note that a spokesperson for the administration actually confirmed that the exchange was real, so we know it happened. We know this happened and Donald Trump refused to address something that had actually been confirmed.

Moss: And I’m sure Donald Trump had no idea that statement had gone out. I’m sure Donald Trump knew nothing about the story. He was probably busy jumping between hitting the Coke button on his desk, chatting up some business deal from people at Mar-a-Lago, and discussing his next tee time. That’s the entirety of what his presidency is. He is the puppet head. He sits there to ramble to the press, to show off his signature, and then to go play golf. He has no insight into what truly happens in this government. And he’s left it to what I would politely describe as a bunch of unserious gaslighting trolls. Not qualified professionals but people whose entire ethos is premised on political gaslighting, from the attorney general to the director of national intelligence to the secretary of defense—all of them. Their entire background is political, not necessarily this area of expertise and professionalism.

Sargent: Let’s go back to what you brought up earlier, which is the legality of this. It seems like it’s cause for serious investigation. It looks as if Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, coordinated this communication, so it’s possible some laws were violated, right? Can you walk us through that?

Moss: Sure. This would almost certainly violate the Espionage Act in that they were placing classified information or, more broadly, national defense information into an unauthorized location, namely the Signal chat, which is not authorized to contain classified discussions. They were disseminating it to other individuals. It’s questionable whether or not everybody in that chat had the requisite need to know; but putting that aside, they’re disseminating it to Jeffrey Goldberg. For whatever reason that these various individuals put him on, that is in and of itself a violation of the Espionage Act and a couple different statutory provisions that don’t even require willful intent but simply have to do with you gave it to an unauthorized third party.

In any other world, in any other time in D.C. politics and governance, this would be a cause for immediate congressional investigations. It would be cause for immediate internal inquiries to determine why this was allowed to happen, to what extent this is a larger problem, and to what extent people involved on these chats cross the line into civil or criminal liability. In the world of Donald Trump and his presidency, it is unlikely that any of that will happen unless and until the Democratic Party finds a way to gather itself together and win the midterms to at least have some oversight authority. I have no reason to believe that’ll happen for the next two years though.

Sargent: I want to ask you about that in a second. I just want to pin down one point, though: Even if you remove the accidental admission of Jeffrey Goldberg to this chat, putting aside the Goldberg leak, there’s still potential criminal liability simply by virtue of them having this group discussion on Signal, right?

Moss: Correct. The actions that Pete Hegseth, Michael Waltz, and all these individuals took of putting this level of clear national defense information on a commercial platform—doing it knowingly, putting what [they] absolutely knew was national defense information there—would almost certainly be considered a violation of the Espionage Act. Will it be prosecuted, even in a perfect world? Unlikely, if for no other reason than Donald Trump has no political interest in throwing these people under the bus. But from a strictly legal standpoint, this was the violation of security procedures, of the trust that’s afforded those with a clearance, and of the simple basic precepts of criminal exposure for national defense information that everyone who works in this field is told to respect.

Sargent: Brad, you pinpointed a key point there, which is that in a world where the people in charge have absolutely zero interest in accountability of any kind, this type of thing becomes more problematic. And I think that is why we should be looking at what Trump said about this and really balking a whole lot and getting alarmed. He clearly doesn’t want accountability for anything that could potentially make him look bad. That’s always the organizing principle for him. And this brings us to Congress as well. You mentioned that there would be a potential role for serious congressional investigations, but as far as I can tell, almost no Republican has said anything. I think Congressman Don Bacon did say communicating via these channels was a huge mistake. It seems like there’s a situation where having an entire political party whose whole project is to protect Trump at all costs is really not ideal, is it?

Moss: This is the concern that so many of us had in terms of this current formulation of the Republican Party. It’s not about anything in particular regarding political principles. It’s not about a particular vision for governance. It’s about kneeling before Donald Trump. Whatever he says on a particular given day is now the position in his government, they’ll fall in line with it. It doesn’t matter if it violates every other provision and every other principle they’ve ever upheld. So I have no reason right now, as you noted, to think that any of these Republican chairmen or members of Republican leadership in the House or the Senate are going to authorize some wide-ranging investigation. There would have to be immense political pressure from within, which I just don’t anticipate seeing.

But it’s going to bubble up, and it’s going to be one of many pieces of evidence of how unserious this administration is and how they’re jeopardizing not only national security but also your safety and your paycheck by doing all these other things with Elon Musk. That will be almost certainly part of the Democratic messaging in the midterms. Whether or not Democrats can effectively do that is a whole different discussion that we can write books about, but this is going to be part and parcel of the next two years of political messaging.

Sargent: Brad, it seems to me that one thing this will also do is really wet the appetites of journalists. They’re going to really start pushing very hard to look at more such situations that could be developing. There’s going to be a tendency to give the administration even less of the benefit of the doubt when they offer their defenses of breaches like these. Where do you see this going? What can you envision happening in terms of future breaches given what we’re talking about here, which is a world with zero accountability?

Moss: One could only hope, standing from outside the journalistic world and the fourth estate, that this reinforces the spine and the backbone of a lot of members and elements of corporate traditional media, who have spent the last two or three months cowering before Donald Trump. They’re intimidated at this point. He’s exerting all kinds of leverage against their shareholders and their corporate bosses. So even if it was unwittingly, they’ve taken a mild hands-off approach at the moment out of fear.

This is yet another crack in Trump’s armor. He can be scrutinized. He can be held accountable, even if only through just public news gathering and dissemination of information. This is what the fourth estate is supposed to do, regardless of Republican or Democrat. This is a clear, obvious angle to pursue to get into how reckless this administration has been, and you would hope that journalists will do so.

Sargent: To wrap this up, looked at this way, you could even see his weird rambling and defensive response as a display of weakness. If he’s not able to grab these situations in hand and act like a real leader, which he isn’t, I think he’s actually showing a pretty major vulnerability there. What do you think?

Moss: Yeah. It’ll call into question not only his competence but also his ability to avoid the curse of Biden, who people took less and less seriously over the course of the four years when it didn’t look like he could really handle the difficult questions, that he was cognizant of the full extent of what was going on. That’s got to be Trump’s biggest fear, because he’s only got about 18 months until he becomes irrelevant. The moment the midterms are done and everybody starts angling for the presidential run in 2028, he becomes an irrelevant lame duck—and it’s going to drive him nuts.

He is either going to pull himself together at this point, or he’s going to watch these types of stories chip away at his political armor, chip away at the ethos, the myth of Donald Trump as an invincible political titan who’s taken down all these political families. It will drive him crazier and crazier to not be able to control what is going on, and to be viewed and seen as simply an ineffectual puppet.

Sargent: One hundred percent. I would even add that Donald Trump knows as well as anybody that he has no effing business standing up there. And that’s why he lashes out whenever the emperor’s clothes are ripped off so violently.

Moss: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s always been his concern: that he’d be exposed.

Sargent: Brad Moss, thanks so much for talking to us, man. Really good conversation.

Moss: Not a problem. Talk soon.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.