Annals of Intelligence

The chatty principals

The Director of Central Intelligence sees no evil.

Unsurprisingly, Pete Hegseth's first instinct was to lie about the thing, brazenly, and about the messenger, Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, suggesting that he'd somehow made the story up:

“I've heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said shortly after landing for a layover in Hawaii on a trip to Asia.

Hegseth criticized Goldberg as “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the, I don't know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides, hopes, or suckers and losers.”

“This is the guy that pedals [sic] in garbage. This is what he does,” he added.

It's true that Goldberg scooped a bunch of news about Trump's contempt for America's war dead ("Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers"), but it's not as if there were any doubt about the truth of that, given his publicly undisguised contempt for Vietnam POW John McCain, and World War II hero George H.W. Bush (shot down as a Navy pilot by Japanese), and the parents of Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004, etc. And if Goldberg was an early proponent, in summer 2016, of the idea that Trump might be a "de facto" Putin agent, he plainly meant not a Putin agent—

t's true that Goldberg scooped a bunch of news about Trump's contempt for America's war dead ("Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers"), but it's not as if there were any doubt about the truth of that, given his publicly undisguised contempt for Vietnam POW John McCain, and World War II hero George H.W. Bush (shot down as a Navy pilot by Japanese), and the parents of Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004, etc. And if Goldberg was an early proponent, in summer 2016, of the idea that Trump might be a "de facto" Putin agent, he plainly meant not a Putin agent—

I am not suggesting that Donald Trump is employed by Putin—though his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was for many years on the payroll of the Putin-backed former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. I am arguing that Trump’s understanding of America’s role in the world aligns with Russia’s geostrategic interests...

—but his rightwing critics don't know what "de facto" means. And he wasn't lying on the subject of the violence in Charlottesville in August 2017 when he complained about Trump's refusal to call out white supremacist terrorism and insistence on making the story about the "very fine people on both sides"; you can disagree with Goldberg's judgment on that, especially if, like Hegseth, you're a white supremacist yourself, but you can't say there's a "hoax" in what he wrote. What Trump said and didn't say is on the record.

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I disagree with Goldberg a lot myself, as a matter of fact, especially on Middle East matters, and on his irritating habit of treating Trump as some kind of normally intentional person, as in that case above where he implies that Trump has an actual "understanding of America's role in the world", and on the almost hysterical bothsidesism of his own stewardship at the Atlantic, and its incessant promotion of the idea that there's a right for every subject that's just as serious as the left—but there can't be any doubt about his journalistic probity, the care he takes in his own reporting to make his sourcing as transparent and trustworthy as possible. The idea that Goldberg "peddles hoaxes" is beyond ridiculous.

Indeed, Goldberg's probity is such, along with his undoubted expertise in security matters, that if you were working, say, in the National Security Council, and happened to discover that all the members of the "principals" committee were unqualified fools who made a habit of discussing highly classified subjects with each other on an insecure chat app, and you wanted to tell the world about this extremely dangerous situation without getting into trouble yourself, you could hardly do better than the thing that has actually happened, getting Goldberg an invitation onto the chat at a big early moment in the Trump 2.0 military history, like this attack on Yemen. You'd be confident he'd be as shocked as you were by their recklessness, and anxious to get the facts out, and you'd know he'd do it right, conveying how bad it is without inaccuracy or alarmism, and without revealing any important secrets; he'd probably even drop out of the chat once he was satisfied it was real, so as not to acquire any more sensitive information than he already had. Which is exactly what Goldberg did.

I'm not saying that happened, but if I were one of the 160 NSC career staffers subjected to a loyalty investigation just around the time of the inauguration, ordered to work from home for the time being and likely to be replaced by a "political", in line with the Project 2025 recommendations for Schedule F, I might think of doing something like that.

Meanwhile, it's at least pretty amazingly lucky that it was Goldberg and not more or less anybody else. But we don't know that other less desirable witnesses haven't succeeded in tuning in to these things—real agents from Russia or China or Turkey or Israel, for instance. I'm told that the Signal app, with end-to-end encryption, is as secure as it gets—they can only get your messages if they get your phone with Signal open, or if they can open it with your password—but it's certainly a violation of the rules to use it to chat about ongoing military options and things like that, which you are supposed to do only from inside a SCIF. Also a serious violation of the rules is the disappearing of messages after a set time: these things are legally required to be preserved under federal law.

It's also amazingly lucky that we were able to learn about it so early in the term.

I've been certain some kind of grotesque security breach was inevitable ever since Trump started naming cabinet members and so many of them were so extremely compromised in different ways—Hegseth and Kennedy because of their lifestyles, Gabbard because of her weird connections to Russia and Syria, all three of these because of their extreme ignorance of the world they'd be entering into; Bondi, replacing the original Gaetz, because of her rank corruption, which we've known about pretty much forever and which has gotten itself noticed very quickly, as she halts the Justice Department's enforcement of bribery laws, guts the anti-kleptocracy efforts against Russian oligarchs and drug cartels alike, and disbands FBI's foreign influence task force, drops charges against Trump pals like bribe-taking congressman Jeff Fortenberry, New York mayor Eric Adams, and movie star Mel Gibson, and threatens investigators, prosecutors, and judges thought to be "disloyal" to the president, and targets law firms associated with Democrats, on the president's orders.

John Ratcliffe, a congressman from the Dallas suburbs with some legal background who came to Republican notice during the 2016 campaign when he campaigned to get Hillary Clinton criminally charged in the emails investigation, was named Director of National Intelligence in spring 2020 (after a nomination process that took almost a year) with the assignment to "rein in" the US intelligence community, which Trump said had "run amok". He distinguished himself by his willingness to abuse the classification system to help out Trump's presidential campaign, lying about evidence that "proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration" and declassifying documents alleging that Hillary Clinton herself had pushed a scheme to implicate Trump in Russian election interferences when he knew the documents were Russian disinformation.

Most important of all is Trump himself, whose misuse of the classification system has become legendary, from his slipping classified material about Israel into the famous Oval Office meeting with Kislyak and Lavrov in May 2017 (where Russian press were allowed to attend and US press weren't) through his habit of tearing up presidential documents and dropping the pieces on the floor to his indictments, now disappeared by Bondi running the Justice Department, for the theft of thousands of documents including many highly classified ones on the day he left office in 2021.

We still don't know, and may never know, what he wanted those things for, but it surely has something to do with whatever he has assigned Kash Patel, his assistant in the document theft, to do as FBI director, and his quest for "retribution" against the members of the intelligence community who caught him in his crimes. He has no interest in national security, other than maybe in perverting the terminology to suggest the existence of an "invasion" that might justify his giving himself emergency powers, and he's put together a team that cares as little as he does, as Jeffrey Goldberg found out.