Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Bradley Moss: Absolutely, any time.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
Reporter (audio voiceover): They were using Signal to coordinate on sensitive materials—
Reporter (audio voiceover): —with the Houthis.
Reporter (audio voiceover): That’s correct.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Sargent: Brad Moss, thanks so much for talking to us, man. Really good conversation.
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.
Hence then, the article about transcript trump s angry rant over hegseth fiasco makes scandal worse was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Transcript: Trump’s Angry Rant over Hegseth Fiasco Makes Scandal Worse )
Also on site :