The big deal in the news for the past few days has been the screw up in a NatSec meeting…..was it a breach or not?

Here is the story as of today….

Much of the discussion around the bizarre national security texting breach has been focused on how it happened and what, if any, punishments are warranted. But some outlets also are assessing the text conversation itself among high-ranking White House officials discussing a pending military strike. Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic journalist accidentally looped into the chat, published some of the back and forth, though no details about the strike itself. Some of the takeaways:

• Vance disagrees: An editorial in the Wall Street Journal points out that Vice President JD Vance disagreed with President Trump’s decision to attack Houthi rebels in Yemen. “I think we are making a mistake,” he wrote, suggesting that it was more in Europe’s interest. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” he said. “There’s a further risk that we see moderate to severe spike in oil prices.” Others disagreed, and planning went forward, but “Trump now knows which of his deputies tried to block it and which tried to carry it out,” notes the editorial. A piece at New York magazine on this is headlined, “Maybe J.D. Vance Isn’t Trump’s Puppet.”

• Hegseth slams Europe: At one point in his back-and-forth with Vance, defense chief Pete Hegseth slammed European allies, reports the BBC. “If you think we should do it let’s go,” Vance texted to Hegseth. “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” To which Hegseth replied: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”
• Blaming Biden: Axios notes that, at least in this conversation, the debate was not so much about military strategy as about how to convey the message to the public that it’s necessary. Hegseth: “I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what—nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”
• Stephen Miller? Goldberg noted that one participant was “SM,” whom he assumed was Stephen Miller. This person was fully on board with the president and also wanted accountability from Europe. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light” to strike the Houthis, SM wrote during the discussion on whether to move forward. In terms of Europe: He said the US must make clear “what we expect in return,” adding that the real question was, “If Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? … If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

My favorite part of this story is the blaming of Biden….

Free-loading Europe?  These guys are idiots.

The Atlantic has released the transcripts of this now ‘infamous’ exchange…..

Two days after revealing that its editor-in-chief was included in a group chat where high-ranking members of the Trump administration discussed plans for strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Atlantic has published those attack plans. As Jeffrey Goldberg, said editor-in-chief, and staff writer Shane Harris write, in the first story on the Signal chat, the Atlantic held off on publishing specific details of the attacks that were contained in the text in keeping with a policy of not publishing information related to military operations if it could potentially lead to harm to US personnel. The calculus changed Tuesday, they write.

Throughout Tuesday, they explain, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and President Trump all insisted there was not classified information in the messages. “These statements presented us with a dilemma,” Goldberg and Harris write. The crux of their decision:

• “The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.”
• Those messages held details on the attacks two hours before the bombing of Houthi positions was due to begin, including “the exact times American aircraft were taking off for Yemen.” In the wrong hands, that info could have been used against American pilots and other US personnel, they write. Based on administration officials’ insistence that the information was not classified, the Atlantic on Tuesday asked the White House if it objected to the messages being published; in the evening, it got a response from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who reiterated there was nothing classified within but said the White House objected as it was intended to be a “private deliberation” of “sensitive information.” It went ahead, with one detail redacted: the name of Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, which appeared in the messages, as CIA intelligence officers are typically not publicly identified.

Let the dance begin.  Who will take the hit for this screw up?

Well the answer is NatSec Adviser Waltz….

National security adviser Mike Waltz, who inadvertently added Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat discussing plans for strikes on Yemen, says he takes “full responsibility” for the Signal breach, but he’s not sure exactly how it happened. “It’s embarrassing. We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he told Laura Ingraham on Fox News‘ The Ingraham Angle in an interview Tuesday.

• Waltz went on to attack Goldberg, calling him “the bottom scum of journalists” and implying that he was somehow to blame for the breach. “I know him in the sense that he hates the president, but I don’t text him,” Waltz said. “He wasn’t on my phone. And we’re going to figure out how this happened.” Waltz said he’s not a conspiracy theorist, “but of all the people out there, somehow this guy who has lied about the president … he’s the one that somehow gets on somebody’s contact and then gets sucked into this group.”

• President Trump blamed a Waltz staffer for the breach Tuesday, but Waltz told Ingraham that it wasn’t a staffer’s fault, the Washington Post reports. He said he meant to add somebody else to the group—he didn’t disclose who—but the number for the contact was Goldberg’s. “You got somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact. So, of course, I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looks like someone else,” Waltz said. “Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is what we are trying to figure out.”

Waltz said he was consulting with Elon Musk, the Guardian reports. “We’ve got the best technical minds looking at how this happened,” he said.

Democrats have called for Waltz to be fired, but Trump said Tuesday that Waltz won’t lose his job over the breach. He described Waltz as a “good man” who has “learned a lesson.”

In an interview the Atlantic published Monday, Goldberg said the episode is “very relatable,” because everybody has sent a text or email to an unintended recipient, and it shows why government officials discussing sensitive issues shouldn’t use Signal. “Until almost the very last minute, I could not believe that this was actually happening, that there could be a Mack-truck-size breach, that somehow, the editor in chief of the Atlantic was invited into a conversation with the intelligence agencies, secretaries, the national security adviser,” he said. “Like most reporters, I’ve been a recipient of leaks. A leak is a totally different thing. That’s a whistleblower trying to make complaints. This is just reckless.”

There is the story so far….I am sure there is more to come.

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