The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
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U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
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I think @[email protected] is positing the idea that perhaps this was an intentional disclosure. A trial balloon, if you will.
Yeah, I find the "accidental" chat with a journalist too strange to take it at face value.
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I think @[email protected] is positing the idea that perhaps this was an intentional disclosure. A trial balloon, if you will.
Ah, I see. I don't think I agree, but I get the statement being made now.
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Yeah, I find the "accidental" chat with a journalist too strange to take it at face value.
Of course they didn't accidentally add a reporter to their private group chat - that's ridiculous! Obviously it was aliens who added him without them noticing. They have advanced technology to add group members in signal without anyone noticing.
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Maybe ot was a staged leak.
These guys aren't even playing 2D chess... 1D chess, snakes and ladders?
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Yeah, I find the "accidental" chat with a journalist too strange to take it at face value.
I know others (including myself, a little) are being dismissive of your position, but the reason I think it is reasonable to be skeptical is because of past examples like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
The Killian documents controversy (also referred to as Memogate or Rathergate) involved six documents containing false allegations about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73, allegedly typed in 1973. Dan Rather presented four of these documents[3] as authentic in a 60 Minutes II broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004, less than two months before the 2004 presidential election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate them. Several typewriter and typography experts soon concluded that they were forgeries. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett provided the documents to CBS, but he claims to have burned the originals after faxing them copies.
This lead to massive shakeup of top personnel at CBS and 60 Minutes and ended up either coinciding with or becoming the reason for Dan Rather leaving the network.
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Maybe ot was a staged leak.
I could see an argument to that in that this is pretty rapidly distracting people from how "Liberation Day" on the 2nd is now not going to be tariff day while they figure out what tariffs they are actually doing.
But this happened on March 14th/15th and, historically, people sit on this until they can write a tell all book eight years after it mattered.
So unless we are going to argue that Jeffrey Goldberg is actually a magat asset and they were sitting on this, it is highly improbable, bordering on impossible, for THIS to be staged.
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U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
Yeah but what about Hillary's emails?
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U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
If any national security disasters happen, it’s all on magats for voting for this putrid shit. Because magats are putrid shit people.
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U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
Prove it.
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These guys aren't even playing 2D chess... 1D chess, snakes and ladders?
Candyland.
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I think @[email protected] is positing the idea that perhaps this was an intentional disclosure. A trial balloon, if you will.
That makes no sense at all though, this would be the dumbest way possible to do that. If you're going to leak something you don't include a paper trail of high level people discussing classified information in ways that are neither legal nor secure. And especially to The Atlantic, they would never be the choice if this was intentional for reasons that should be obvious.
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U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
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This is absolutely staggering. I’m still trying to process the fact that senior U.S. officials—people at the highest levels of government—were casually texting war plans over Signal, an app that’s not even approved for classified communications. Not only that, but they accidentally added a journalist to the group chat. And then? Just carried on like nothing happened. No one noticed. No one asked questions. They dropped operational details, discussed strategy, named targets, and then capped it all off with high-five emojis.
It’s not just irresponsible—it’s surreal. This isn’t a parody or a leaked TV script. This happened. They talked about military strikes the same way people coordinate a fantasy football draft. And then, as if to hammer home just how broken our national security culture has become, they celebrated the bombing of a foreign country with emojis. Fire, flags, praying hands, muscle arms. Like they’d just won a pickup basketball game.
What’s worse—what really makes my blood boil—is that nothing will come of it. Nothing. There won’t be hearings. No one will be fired. There won’t even be a slap on the wrist. The fact that a sitting Secretary of Defense might have violated the Espionage Act by leaking sensitive war plans over an unsecured app to a journalist should be a full-blown national scandal. Instead? Silence. Shrugs. Maybe a Fox News segment praising how "tough" the response was.
It’s the normalization of absurdity. It’s government by group chat, with the fate of lives—American and otherwise—being tossed around like a Twitter thread. And the most horrifying part? They all seem to think this is fine. Routine. Standard operating procedure.
This is bigger than partisan politics. This is about the breakdown of basic standards—of competence, of professionalism, of decency. If this doesn’t trigger national outrage, if this doesn’t result in real consequences, then we’ve officially accepted that chaos, recklessness, and emoji warfare are the new norm.
I’m furious. And if you're not, you should be too.
nothing will come of it
You're probably right, but maybe it'll cause Trump to turn on Vance a little?
I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.
Surely these assholes are going to fall out spectacularly in the near future.
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That's a fair cop, but historically the Nazis of yesteryear were actually a lot more disorganized and stupid than we give them credit for, too. I mean, the entire "Master Race" thing is rooted in a deep misunderstanding about how genetics and evolution works on a functional level. Like, it's literally a stupid position to have if you understand actual genetics. They were very stupid in other areas as well.
So, while I understand the hesitance to take it as gospel (heh) I think that history shows us it's quite likely that they really are just this stupid. Chaos is a ladder and all that.
That's a fair cop, but historically the Nazis of yesteryear were actually a lot more disorganized and stupid than we give them credit for, too. I mean, the entire "Master Race" thing is rooted in a deep misunderstanding about how genetics and evolution works on a functional level. Like, it's literally a stupid position to have if you understand actual genetics. They were very stupid in other areas as well.
It would appear this is something they may have argued about a little at the Wannsee Conference...
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I know others (including myself, a little) are being dismissive of your position, but the reason I think it is reasonable to be skeptical is because of past examples like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
The Killian documents controversy (also referred to as Memogate or Rathergate) involved six documents containing false allegations about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73, allegedly typed in 1973. Dan Rather presented four of these documents[3] as authentic in a 60 Minutes II broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004, less than two months before the 2004 presidential election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate them. Several typewriter and typography experts soon concluded that they were forgeries. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett provided the documents to CBS, but he claims to have burned the originals after faxing them copies.
This lead to massive shakeup of top personnel at CBS and 60 Minutes and ended up either coinciding with or becoming the reason for Dan Rather leaving the network.
Thanks for the response and interesting link. I should have worded my initial comment better, I suppose.
What I am saying it that it may be worth considering that the extraordinary nature of the leak warrants a critical analysis of a possible ulterior motive or furtherance of some other agenda.
What I may be, I don't know.
However, for instance, even more than the leak itself, I find it ultimately more relevant that a very anti-European stance was expressed in the coziness of a "private" chat by the senior most national-security officials of the US.
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That makes no sense at all though, this would be the dumbest way possible to do that. If you're going to leak something you don't include a paper trail of high level people discussing classified information in ways that are neither legal nor secure. And especially to The Atlantic, they would never be the choice if this was intentional for reasons that should be obvious.
I would argue that just like rape is about power, things like this could conceivably be about power as well. Much of the hypocrisy of the right can be boiled down to showing that they can do this and you cannot. We see it as hypocrisy, but it's actually an expression of power. They don't care that we see them as hypocrites, because that's the point, to express their power to do this while the likes of Reality Winner and Jack Teixeira cannot.
What's anyone gonna do about it? Nothing ever happened to Bush for millions of missing emails, nothing happened to Clinton for a foolish private email server, and nothing happened to Trump in his first term when refused to use a secure phone and kept using his normal one. I think it will amount to the same for these people, as well.
I am not pushing back as hard as others on this opinion because I think it's reasonable to be skeptical for a few reason. I am in the "it was probably a mistake" camp myself, but I can see based on prior behavior from people who are, well, rapists, that it could easily be about showing us what they can get away with as an expression of power.
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This is absolutely staggering. I’m still trying to process the fact that senior U.S. officials—people at the highest levels of government—were casually texting war plans over Signal, an app that’s not even approved for classified communications. Not only that, but they accidentally added a journalist to the group chat. And then? Just carried on like nothing happened. No one noticed. No one asked questions. They dropped operational details, discussed strategy, named targets, and then capped it all off with high-five emojis.
It’s not just irresponsible—it’s surreal. This isn’t a parody or a leaked TV script. This happened. They talked about military strikes the same way people coordinate a fantasy football draft. And then, as if to hammer home just how broken our national security culture has become, they celebrated the bombing of a foreign country with emojis. Fire, flags, praying hands, muscle arms. Like they’d just won a pickup basketball game.
What’s worse—what really makes my blood boil—is that nothing will come of it. Nothing. There won’t be hearings. No one will be fired. There won’t even be a slap on the wrist. The fact that a sitting Secretary of Defense might have violated the Espionage Act by leaking sensitive war plans over an unsecured app to a journalist should be a full-blown national scandal. Instead? Silence. Shrugs. Maybe a Fox News segment praising how "tough" the response was.
It’s the normalization of absurdity. It’s government by group chat, with the fate of lives—American and otherwise—being tossed around like a Twitter thread. And the most horrifying part? They all seem to think this is fine. Routine. Standard operating procedure.
This is bigger than partisan politics. This is about the breakdown of basic standards—of competence, of professionalism, of decency. If this doesn’t trigger national outrage, if this doesn’t result in real consequences, then we’ve officially accepted that chaos, recklessness, and emoji warfare are the new norm.
I’m furious. And if you're not, you should be too.
They're going to try and ruin this journalist for embarrassing them, that's what will happen.
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They want to show that they really believe in those bullshit prayers, that they are good Christians or something like that. When behind the scenes they don't give a shit about religion.
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Is it weird that the most shocking thing to me in all of this is that they all act like facebook boomers even in "private" operational meetings? "I will say a prayer for victory," coming out of fucking vance's fingers (and then prayer emojis from everyone else) is just fucking insanity. Like, I expected that behind closed doors they all call it nonsense and act like 4chan dipshits.
The mass leaking of operational information is totally to be expected. Just look at russians and Telegram.
Like, I expected that behind closed doors they all call it nonsense
No, they are actually stupid enough to believe the shit they are saying.
