Our two local Republican congressmen, Ben Cline and John McGuire, have gone radio silent on Signalgate, though Cline did at least publicly acknowledge that there was a House Intelligence Committee meeting on the schedule for Wednesday.
Cline, a MAGA back-bencher, even tweeted that he was “looking forward” to the committee meeting, in which the principals in the controversy in which attack plans were leaked in real time to the editor of The Atlantic were raked over the coals, but not for the reason that anybody with half a brain would expect.
Cline noted that he would be tuning in “to hear how our intel leaders plan to reverse the damage done by the Biden administration, combat terrorism, and restore America’s national security strength.”
We live in a bizarro world.
“Department of Defense policies dictate that information concerning military plans, such as contained in the messages sent by the Secretary of Defense, is classified, and no reasonable process would allow for communication of this information over a commercial messaging application before U.S. pilots had completed and safely returned from their mission,” U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote in a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel dated Wednesday, in which Warner, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, requested confirmation that the FBI will open an investigation into the Signal group chat that senior Trump administration officials used to discuss classified information about airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen.
As the world is now well aware, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz inadvertently invited Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor, into an unsecured chat to discuss the plans for the strikes that included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who blurted out sensitive details of the pending March 15 airstrikes in the chat.
The response from the Trump administration has been to deny and deflect, pretending that the sensitive information about the strikes was neither classified nor important to the operation, and trying to make Goldberg out to be a liar and even suggesting that he might have broken the law by hacking the chat.
“I can’t overemphasize how amateurish this was, and if there’s any part of our life in the government that cannot be amateurish, it’s national security,” said U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “When you have the Secretary of Defense sharing classified information in all likelihood from his cell phone, and the cell phone can’t be brought into a classified facility, so he’s likely doing it on his cell phone outside of a classified facility, with the full knowledge that personal cell phones are hacked by our adversaries, and he’s sharing information about war plans, including specific targeting information, including the platform that the U.S. will use to deliver the attack, that’s information that puts our service members at risk.”
Warner was similarly blunt on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, saying directly that he believed Gabbard and Ratcliffe “lied” to the Senate Intelligence Committee in their testimony on Tuesday, and that Hegseth “should do the right thing and resign.”
“Where do we go from here? Let me give you a couple things that we need to hear and we need to find out. One, have we collected the phones that these individuals use to make sure they’re not compromised? There is the ability for spy services to place malware in phones. We got to make sure it didn’t happen. And again, to just make this so much more egregious, you had the Director of National Intelligence abroad doing this, and she wouldn’t even acknowledge whether it’s her phone or the government phone. And we need an answer to that,” Warner said.
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Chris Graham
