To the editor:
Things are moving fast on this one. By the time this is published heads may have rolled. If not, the system's more broken than we'd feared. Let's look at what happened.
On March 11, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, received a connection request from President Trump's national security adviser on the publicly available encryption app Signal. Two days later, he found himself included on a group chat headed: "The Houthi PC (Principals Committee) Small Group." Note that Goldberg didn't initiate contact on either chain. The first came by invitation, the second he was just included into automatically by a member of the group.
These members include the vice president, secretary of state, director of national security, secretary of defense, CIA director and others, including the White House chief of staff.
Goldberg, a private citizen, found himself unwittingly privy to a confidential and sensitive conversation among the most senior officials of Trump's administration as they coordinated and planned military action against a declared terrorist organization in Yemen, including - according to Goldberg, "precise information about weapons packages, targets and timing."
This point alone should make this the most politically damaging scandal of the modern era; eclipsing Lewinski, overshadowing Ukraine-gate, outstripping Jan 6, surpassing Benghazi, topping Whitewater and exceeding Hillary's emails. But wait, there's more!
Goldberg being cc'd is a serious failure demonstrating gross incompetence on the part of everyone involved who didn't realize they were sharing state secrets with a civilian, but as it happens, one of those on the call, the president's chief Middle East adviser, wasn't even in the country when the call initiated. He was in -- wait for it -- Moscow.
That's right, Russian agents may easily have been eavesdropping on the chat chain and following the disclosure of top-secret military plans in real time. Do I know they were? No, but the point is that's not a risk government officials entrusted with the security of military personnel should be taking. In fact, the NSA issued a special bulletin in February warning that the Signal app in particular was "a high-value target to intercept sensitive information" when used by "common targets of surveillance and espionage," which one would assume the president's chief Middle East adviser would qualify as.
This is all gallingly hypocritical, as Republicans famously used a similar (albeit remarkably less inclined to imminent military upheaval) breach of protocol by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to undermine trust in the Obama administration when it was learned that she'd utilized a private e-mail server to conduct official business during her tenure.
This cannot be swept under the rug. It must monopolize headlines on every news source for the next several months, even into the next election cycle. Democrats should make this the center-point of their campaigns in the midterms. This is Watergate, Hillary's e-mails and the White Papers times ten. Trump's downfall is way overdue, but even the reddest red-hat should be able to see how woefully inept this proves this administration to be.
J. David Core
Toronto