The Wall Street Journal let “bully” Donald Trump have it in a flaming editorial over the Signal chat security bungle, saying he can’t simply blame the “fake news” every time something goes wrong in his administration.
Trump first blamed an unnamed “lower level” staffer for inadvertently including The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldfarb, in a high-level group chat on specific bombing plans in Yemen earlier this month on Signal, an encryption messaging app available to the public.
Some 53 people, including children, were killed in the strikes later that same day.
Then Trump attacked Goldberg as a “loser.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Levitt attributed the grave error to a mysterious “misinformation” campaign by the mainstream media even though Trump’s own National Security Adviser Mark Waltz had confessed that he was the one who accidentally invited Goldberg into the chat, exposing highly sensitive information.
“The Administration seems to think it can bully its way through anything by shouting Fake News and attacking the press,” snapped the editorial Wednesday night in the Journal, run by one-time fervent Trump supporter Rupert Murdoch.
The information that Defense Secretary and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth shared in the chat was “obviously sensitive information about a pending attack, and in the wrong hands it could have compromised the mission,” the Journal noted.
Sometimes, the Journal advised, the administration has to “admit to a mistake” and “take the loss.”
Trump and his administration have desperately tried to downplay the seriousness of the botched call. Officials have said the information wasn’t classified, and posed no danger. Trump even insisted it was “not a big deal.”
But retired Army General Barry McCaffery said in a statement on social media this week that information about pending U.S. military operations is in fact the “most sensitive” intelligence, which can be used by the wrong people to kill Americans.
“In this case, we’re talking about the lives of Air Force and Navy fliers” involved in the strikes, he emphasized.
McCaffery insisted that a military official in a similar situation would face a court martial if an unsecured app was used to communicate such information.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to preserve records of the text message chat in response to a demand by the group American Oversight, which has sued over the use of Signal for the bombing texts, arguing it’s use is not authorized under federal records statues.
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