Episode #2: Signal-Gate
Everyday feels like an episode of Jerry Springer when Trump is in charge
Today’s scandal is about Leaked information
Here is what happened:
Senior Trump officials were using a known non-secure phone app to discuss a military strike.
The use of this app…Signal…has one single advantage, it is secured in a way that your conversations on it cannot be collected as they should be by law. In other words, you can talk about stuff and then later deny it because no one has access to it…unless you are a Russian hacker who is known to have breached the app’s security
An American journalist was somehow added to the chat, including things like weapons and the timing of a pending attack. It also included trash talk about our European allies.
Trump’s CIA, Intelligence, and military top officials claimed nothing classified was on the chat. This allowed the journalist to safely publish the chat which clearly showed it was All about classified information
My problems with this:
- Don’t use chat because your official conversations belong to the public and the public can’t get them from Signal
- Don’t lie to Congress and say “There was no classified information” because there was.
- Trump, faced with one of the largest scandals of his career said something like, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and if I did it was no big deal.”
- The overall ineptness and lying are standard fare for Trump. Our Ex-European allies have taken notice of this and are no longer willing to share some sensitive information with us simply because They No Longer Trust Us.
Trump, when finally cornered said, “This was the first minor slip-up in an otherwise perfect first 2 months of my administration.” In response to this Rachael Maddow lists how the first two months were “not quite perfect.”
I watched the senate hearing debacle. If folks don’t know it by now, the easiest way to get a long-winded deflective answer is to pose a yes or no question, the answer usually ending with the lack of recall.
I had no problem with the actual mission – take out some of these Iran backed rebels who take potshots at international shipping. I guess POTUS isn’t interested in making this sort of OP a war room function.
Speaking of deflection, I do recall an operation shortly after the 2017 inauguration. We lost a Navy Seal, helicopter and several Yemeni civilians in a failed attempt to take out a high ranking Houthi member. The reason POTUS gave for the failure was that Obama gave them bad intel! Maybe an update was in order.
Possibly my only issue with the entire debacle was the lack of ownership. A simple, “We fucked up. We are making sure it won’t happen again.” That would have worked for me.