We’ve all texted or emailed someone by mistake, but it’s unacceptable to accidentally message someone about matters in which American service members’ lives are at risk. If any lower-level officials in our government did such a thing, they would lose their jobs — or at the very least be severely punished, and deservedly so.
President Trump made pretty clear on Wednesday evening that he wasn’t eager to fire anyone over The Atlantic’s editor being inadvertently added to a chat in which senior officials openly discussed U.S. military plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen before they occurred. Trump told reporters that people should be focused instead on the success of the military strikes. “There was no harm done,” he said of the group chat, adding that Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, had taken responsibility for it — though he did spend some time questioning the validity of Signal.
It is clear now, however, that Trump — who issued an executive order on government accountability — needs to hold someone accountable for what occurred. Otherwise, it sets an unacceptable precedent that this can happen again.
It’s not been explained how or why senior government officials are using Signal, a publicly available messaging application, when the U.S. government spends millions of dollars on encrypted classified networks and information security. One after another, senior officials have publicly avoided serious responsibility for what occurred.
Waltz, who reportedly included Goldberg on the chat, said he was responsible for creating the chat but tried to sidestep the blunder. “Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there? Right? You’ve got somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact,” he said in an interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News on Tuesday.
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, reiterated on Wednesday that he didn’t text “war plans.” But as messages newly released by The Atlantic show, he’s simply playing semantics. The reported messages show that he texted the precise time when U.S. Navy fighter jets would launch from aircraft carriers at sea and the time they would release their bombs over Houthi targets.
