It’s inexplicable that Jeffrey Goldberg, a reporter for The Atlantic, was included on a Signal commercially encrypted chat group for the recent air strikes in Yemen. On March 11, Goldberg received an invitation to join the group from national security adviser Michael Waltz. Goldberg thought it was some sort of scam or set-up to discredit him, because he’s hardly a friend of the fascist regime, but he accepted the invitation out of curiosity.

It soon began to look like it might be the real thing as others joined the group and identified themselves as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice-President J.D. Vance, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, among others. But Goldberg remained skeptical.

In fact, he wasn’t fully convinced this was a real chat group until, on March 15, Hegseth sent out details of the coming Yemen strikes, including the time they would begin, and then the strikes began as scheduled.

At that point, Goldberg realized he had a major scoop, and spent the next ten days working on the story. When the article hit, it became clear that Goldberg acted responsibly by withholding any information that could directly hurt national security. But he did reveal some juicy tidbits, including that Vance openly doubted the wisdom of doing the strikes at all. Why would the vice-president undercut Trump in this way and in this forum?

The biggest question of all is why Goldberg was invited. It appears that it was inadvertent. If it was intentional, it was certainly an ill-conceived idea. The next question is why this was being conducted on Signal. There are several problems with using Signal for such sensitive communications. The first is that it is illegal. It’s not an approved channel for sharing classified information, and part if its design is that it auto-destructs messages after a designated period of time, which likely runs afoul of laws about preserving government records.

It’s an encrypted app and so it’s presumably secure from easy hacking, but there’s nothing to prevent someone like Goldberg from being inadvertently invited. It can also be accessed on anyone’s phone, so if someone loses their phone or has it stolen, the encryption is only as good as their password. War planning conversations should be conducted in secure rooms specially designed to defeat eavesdropping.

Politico is reporting that the fascist regime is embarrassed enough by this fuck up that they’re seriously discussing firing Waltz.

A person close to the White House was even more blunt: “Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot.”

But one thing that stands out from reading through some of the texts is that no one questioned the use of Signal. No one suggested it was improper or that the records they were creating must be preserved. No one mentioned that it wasn’t a secure enough way to communicate. Everyone behaved as if this was a completely expected and pre-coordinated way of conducing business.

It was the CIA director, not Waltz, who designated an undercover officer by name as his delegate for a principals group they set up for the Yemen strike. Goldberg has preserved that officer’s anonymity and thereby saved his career. And it was Hegseth who sent a post that “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” Likewise, Goldberg didn’t share this sensitive information.

It’s true that Waltz is ultimately responsible for creating the group, as well as for inviting Goldberg, but it seems likely that Signal is being widely used by the regime for both routine and other classified discussions, and this is almost assuredly to evade record-keeping requirements mandated by law. They can make Waltz the fall guy here, but everyone involved is culpable.

These things will continue until the fascist regime is defeated.