To the editor:

In March, I authored a letter about the Signal App debacle when a reporter was inadvertently included in what should’ve been a top-secret high-level “eyes-only” group-chat about military operations (“Don’t blame the messenger app,” March 30.) I opened that letter by writing, “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.”

Well as we all now know, no heads rolled, and it is worse than I feared. Initially, Karoline Leavitt called it a hoax, which (spoiler alert) it wasn’t; and Trump ultimately blew the whole thing off saying in effect that they wouldn’t be using Signal anymore, except when they do use it.

I explained in my letter just how careless this showed this team is concluding by saying, “even the reddest red-hat should be able to see how woefully inept this proves this administration to be.” Unfortunately, the story died, and now in a case of history rhyming, yet another incompetent security lapse has come to light, and nobody seems to care.

You may not have heard, but last week, as Trump and his team gathered in Alaska for a fruitless meeting with Russian President Putin, NPR reported that a State Department employee left sensitive documents in a hotel printer which were discovered by civilian guests of the inn. The pages detailed locations and meeting times that were not public and could’ve put the lives of diplomats at risk had they fallen into nefarious hands.

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott sloughed off concern, calling the document a “glorified lunch menu,” but I think there’s a deeper issue everyone’s overlooking: This administration has now exhibited a pattern of incompetence and a lack of process. These are just two incidents that we know of. It almost certainly demonstrates a practice of sloppy precaution.

If the state department’s using public printers for “glorified menus,” which lay out the movements of the president, what else are they using public printers for? Those machines have a hard drive that stores every document sent to them, and they generally receive those files through easily hacked networks; and it’s not as if that’s not an exploit commonly known by black-hat hackers. There are numerous examples of data theft accomplished using this vulnerability.

But perhaps a bigger question is why does this administration refuse to hold anyone responsible for — well — anything? They’ll fire anyone not in their bubble for nonsense reasons. For example, a Biden appointee was recently fired from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for reporting labor statistics, and Trump’s hoping to replace her with an unqualified loyalist.

If you’re part of his cabal, you get a free ride.

Maybe this time around heads will roll for this breech, or maybe the next time or the time after that. But one thing’s certain, any head that rolls will belong to an expendable outsider who doesn’t have Trump’s ear.

His good ear, the one not shot by a guy with prior knowledge of Trump’s location.

J. David Core

Toronto