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Whiskey Pete’s Dirty Desktop

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We continue to get more details of Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s abysmal operational security.

Today, NYT revisited the issue of Pete Hegseth’s shoddy operational security, tracking all the other accounts he had registered under the phone number with which he used Signal.

Mr. Hegseth had a significant social media presence, a WhatsApp profile and a Facebook page, which he still has.

On Aug. 15, 2024, he used his personal phone number to join Sleeper.com, a fantasy football and sports betting site, using the username “PeteHegseth.” Less than two weeks later, a phone number associated with his wife, Jennifer, also joined the site. She was included in one of the two Signal chats about the strikes.

Mr. Hegseth also left other digital breadcrumbs, using his phone to register for Airbnb and Microsoft Teams, a video and communications program.

Mr. Hegseth’s number is also linked to an email address that is in turn linked to a Google Maps profile. Mr. Hegseth’s reviews on Google Maps include endorsements of a dentist (“The staff is amazing”), a plumber (“Fast, honest, and quality work”), a mural painter (“Painted 2 beautiful flags for us — spot on”) and other businesses. (Google Maps street view blurs out Mr. Hegseth’s former home.)

What they don’t say is the accessibility of his personal phone number could have made it easier to ID the IP address for the computer that (per the AP) Hegseth set up in his office so he could access Signal.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had an internet connection that bypassed the Pentagon’s security protocols set up in his office to use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer, two people familiar with the line told The Associated Press.

The existence of the unsecured internet connection is the latest revelation about Hegseth’s use of the unclassified app and raises the possibility that sensitive defense information could have been put at risk of potential hacking or surveillance.

Known as a “dirty” internet line by the IT industry, it connects directly to the public internet where the user’s information and the websites accessed do not have the same security filters or protocols that the Pentagon’s secured connections maintain.

Other Pentagon offices have used them, particularly if there’s a need to monitor information or websites that would otherwise be blocked.

But the biggest advantage of using such a line is that the user would not show up as one of the many IP addresses assigned to the Defense Department — essentially the user is masked, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with military network security.

[snip]

Hegseth initially was going to the back area of his office where he could access Wi-Fi to use his devices, one of the people familiar said, and then he requested a line at his desk where he could use his own computer.

That meant at times there were three computers around his desk — a personal computer; another for classified information; and a third for sensitive defense information, both people said.

Because electronic devices are vulnerable to spying, no one is supposed to have them inside the defense secretary’s office. Important offices at the Pentagon have a cabinet or drawer where staff or visitors are required to leave devices.

But there’s a detail that remains unexplained, one which makes this more interesting.

In addition to the texts themselves, Jeffrey Goldberg provided a number of useful details about the Houthi PC small group thread.

He included the list of the 19 people who belonged to it when he left.

We see the Principals add people (and Mike Waltz add someone believed to be Stephen Miller) along the way.

Goldberg also included metadata showing Mike Waltz setting the disappearing messages. In addition, we see Marco Rubio adding a second account for himself, “MAR added MAR.”

Rubio might have done that if he had a second device.

Given that that was all public by March 26 — which was, itself, nine days after Goldberg dropped off the list — it raises questions about why, on both March 26 and March 28 (per a CIA filing in the American Oversight lawsuit), people were fiddling with administrative settings.

I understand that the Director’s personal Signal account was reviewed and a screenshot of the Signal Chat at issue was captured from the Director’s account on 31 March 2025, and transferred to Agency records systems the same day. I understand that the screenshot reflects the information available at the time the screenshot was captured, which I characterized as “residual administrative content” in my initial declaration. I used that terminology because the screenshot does not include substantive messages from the Signal chat; rather, it captures the name of the chat, “Houthi PC small group”, and reflects administrative notifications from 26 March and 28 March relating to changes in participants’ administrative settings in this group chat, such as profile names and message settings.

That is, the only thing left on John Ratcliffe’s personal cell phone when they went to archive messages covered by the Federal Records Act was a version of the screen shot above — with the name of the chat, the dates March 26 and 28, changes in message settings (perhaps Mike Waltz trying to undo the damage of his disappearing timeline), and changes in profile names.

It’s the last bit that is most interesting. It might reflect people, in addition to the 19, who were added after Goldberg dropped off, people who were even more problematic to be included in the chat than Jeffrey Goldberg. It shouldn’t reflect people changing their own screen names; at that point, after Goldberg published, there would be no point.

But there’s also something that remains unexplained, given the new information we have.

We know from the second of three DOD declarations in the same American Oversight lawsuit that someone — the passive voice is used — did a search of Whiskey Pete’s “mobile device,” whence the “available Signal application messages that are at issue in this case have been preserved.” We know from the third declaration that a search — possibly the only one — that was conducted (the passive voice is used again) on March 27, between the day of the first admin changes reflected on Ratcliffe’s personal phone, March 26, and the day of the second administrative changes, March 28.

What we don’t have, however, is any indication how Hegseth accessed Signal via two different devices, the personal cell that was searched (passive voice) and the desktop in his office hooked up to the dirty old Internet — that is, whether he had a second account, maybe called WarFightersLoveWhiskey or just Pete, or whether he did in fact use his publicly identifiable phone number on the desktop hooked up to the dirty old Internet. That’s actually one possible explanation for the changes on March 26 and 28.

Perhaps we could answer that question by searching the device in Whiskey Pete’s office for Federal Records Act compliance?

Or maybe, as I said, there was someone added in the nine days after Goldberg left.

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Tulsi Gabbard’s NIE Lies Make Dick Cheney Look Honest by Comparison

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Yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard posted this tweet.

The last sentence of the tweet, referencing an “assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime,” makes clear it pertains to a National Intelligence Estimate described last week by WaPo (and that Tulsi’s bossy claims about leak investigations pertains to the story itself, which I’ll return to).

As WaPo described it, 17 of 18 intelligence agencies say Tulsi is lying.

According to WaPo, the NIE says that,

although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader.

[snip]

The finding was nearly unanimous among the U.S. intelligence agencies with the exception of the FBI, which assessed a moderate level of cooperation between the gang and the Venezuelan government, two people familiar with the matter said.

At least as WaPo describes, Tulsi may even be overstating the FBI conclusion that TdA had a moderate level of cooperation with the government, instead spinning that as, “Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime.”

If WaPo’s reporting is accurate — and we can be virtually certain it is — Tulsi is trying to rewrite the NIE to support Trump’s view, all the while screaming about weaponization.

WaPo describes the stakes of this dispute, but not very clearly. Whether TdA operates at the direction of Venezuela is one key prong on which Trump’s bid to deport Venezuelan makeup artists and soccer players with no due process to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp in El Salvador.

Trump’s manic bid to deport hundreds of migrants to Nayob Bukele’s concentration camp rests on a series of tactics. Many of the tactics were evident in the mad rush last Friday, in the face of a legal injunction prohibiting deportation under the Alien Enemies Act in Southern District of Texas, to instead load a bunch of Venezuelans on planes in Northern District of Texas, from the Bluebonnet Detention Center.

Most of this (the bottom four entries describing how Trump is trying to use AEA deportations) is a bid to use the Alien Enemies Act in a particular way: to bypass deportation proceedings, providing last minute notice (reportedly in English) that guards demand detainees sign, rather than information about the availability of habeas corpus petitions, loading them onto flights where there is not yet an injunction, with demands that men sign documents affirming they are TdA members along the way. Those tactics are what we’re seeing in one frantic legal fight after another.

The Administration seems to want to get the AEA interpreted in this instance to allow virtually no due process — nothing more than Stephen Miller screeching on Fox News that you are TdA, without proof — to deport people who presented in the US, often making asylum claims.

But the larger scheme will only work if courts uphold the AEA in this context, for use in peacetime against a population from one particular home country. Here’s how Trump pitched TdA in the declaration itself.

Tren de Aragua (TdA) is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States. TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.

TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus. TdA grew significantly while Tareck El Aissami served as governor of Aragua between 2012 and 2017. In 2017, El Aissami was appointed as Vice President of Venezuela. Soon thereafter, the United States Department of the Treasury designated El Aissami as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, 21 U.S.C. 1901 et seq. El Aissami is currently a United States fugitive facing charges arising from his violations of United States sanctions triggered by his Department of the Treasury designation.

Like El Aissami, Nicolas Maduro, who claims to act as Venezuela’s President and asserts control over the security forces and other authorities in Venezuela, also maintains close ties to regime-sponsored narco-terrorists. Maduro leads the regime-sponsored enterprise Cártel de los Soles, which coordinates with and relies on TdA and other organizations to carry out its objective of using illegal narcotics as a weapon to “flood” the United States. In 2020, Maduro and other regime members were charged with narcoterrorism and other crimes in connection with this plot against America.

Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States. Indeed, in December 2024, INTERPOL Washington confirmed: “Tren de Aragua has emerged as a significant threat to the United States as it infiltrates migration flows from Venezuela.” Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States and continues to invade, attempt to invade, and threaten to invade the country; perpetrated irregular warfare within the country; and used drug trafficking as a weapon against our citizens. [my emphasis]

Some of this (we’re not at war no matter how inflammatory Trump claims migration is) is not legally apt to the statute. Some of this (the specific ties between Maduro and the gang, including his intent to use the gang as a weapon) is not true.

Which is why Tulsi is attempting to claim it is. Thus the stakes on the NIE. Thus Tulsi’s need to claim the NIE concluded something other than it concluded.

As ACLU is arguing in cases challenging the use of the AEA around the country (in this case, men in NDTX saved from deportation by SCOTUS’ intervention on Saturday), the Trump Administration shouldn’t be able to use the AEA at all in this context, because the US is not at war, and the convoluted assertions Trump made to claim we are — that the US is being invaded by a gang backed by Venezuela — does not hold up.

In a Proclamation signed on March 14 but not made public until March 15 (after the government had already attempted to use it), the President invoked a war power, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (“AEA”), to summarily remove noncitizens from the U.S. and bypass the immigration laws Congress has enacted. See Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (Mar. 15, 2025) (“Proclamation”).1 The AEA permits the President to invoke the AEA only where the United States is in a “declared war” with a “foreign government or nation” or a ‘foreign government or nation” is threatening to, or has engaged in, an “invasion or predatory incursion” against the “territory of the United States.” The Proclamation targets Venezuelan noncitizens accused of being part of Tren de Aragua (“TdA”), a criminal gang, and claims that the gang is engaged in an “invasion and predatory incursion” within the meaning of the AEA.

[snip]

Petitioners contend that the Proclamation is invalid under the AEA for several reasons. First, the Proclamation fails to the AEA’s statutory predicates because TdA is not a “foreign nation or government,” nor is TdA is engaged in an “invasion” or “predatory incursions” within the meaning of the AEA. Thus, the government’s attempt to summarily remove Venezuelan noncitizens exceeds the wartime authority that Congress delegated in the AEA. Second, the Proclamation violates both the Act and due process by failing to provide notice and a meaningful opportunity for individuals to challenge their designation as alien enemies. Third, the Proclamation violates the process and protections that Congress has prescribed for the removal of noncitizens in the immigration laws, including protection against being sent to a country where they will be tortured.

If ACLU successfully argues that there’s an NIE that shows even the Intelligence Community knows the basis on which Trump declared AEA is false, then it will undermine the entire effort to use AEA to achieve due process-free deportations.

As I said above, we can be pretty sure that Tulsi is lying on Xitter. That’s not just because her Global Threat Assessment, released a week after Trump invoked the AEA, makes no mention of such invasion or even Tren de Agua (which I noted here). But also because because when Joaquin Castro asked her about such assessment, she confessed that there were competing assessments.

Castro: I want to ask about the Alien Enemies Act, real quick, while I have time. The President has used the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last used to detain German and Japanese nationals during World War II, to summarily deport people accused of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. To invoke this law, the President must demonstrate the United States is under invasion by a foreign nation or government. They have alleged that we are under invasion by the Venezuelan government. The idea that we are at war with Venezuela would come as a surprise to most Americans. The unclassified version of the Annual Threat Assessment the Intelligence Community just released makes no mention of any invasion or war that we are fighting with the nation of Venezuela. You would think our nation being at war would merit at least a small reference in this Threat Assessment. Director Ratcliffe, does the Intelligence Community assess that we are currently at war or being invaded by the nation of Venezuela?

Ratcliffe: We have no assessment that says that.

Castro: In invoking the law the President alleged that Venezuela is taking hostile actions at the direction — clandestine or otherwise — of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Director Gabbard: Does the Intelligence Community assess the Venezuelan government is directing Tred de Aragua’s hostile actions against the United States.

Gabbard: There are varied assessments that came from different Intelligence Community elements. I’ll defer to Director Patel to speak specifically to the FBI assessment.

[Kash moves to speak.]

Castro: But let me ask you. So you’re saying there are conflicting assessments that have come from the IC?

Gabbard: That’s correct.

Castro: Thank you. We’ll take it up in closed session.

For his part, John Ratcliffe admitted that “we” (possibly meaning the CIA) has no assessment that backs Trump’s claim of invasion. The CIA would be one of the 17 agencies that debunked Trump’s claim.

So now that WaPo confirmed what was evident just from this exchange (the WaPo story notes that both Castro and Jim Himes raised the AEA during the hearing) Tulsi is trying to lie about the assessment by claiming this is an illegal leak, precisely the weaponization against which Trump ran.

The weaponization of intelligence to undermine the President’s agenda is an assault on democracy. Those behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence, twisted and manipulated to convey the exact opposite finding, will be held accountable under the full force of the law. Rooting out this politicization of intelligence is exactly what President Trump campaigned on and what Americans overwhelmingly voted for.

Blah blah blah.

Unless Tulsi wants to start going after her former House colleagues, it’s likely there was no classified leak. It goes little beyond what Tulsi herself said in this exchange with Castro, and otherwise relies on named expert sources.

“The idea that Maduro is directing Tren de Aragua members and sending criminals to infiltrate the United States is ludicrous,” said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

The group, which started as a prison gang in the Venezuelan state of Aragua in 2014, has expanded into a transnational gang that has carried out brazen crimes from Santiago, Chile, to New York City. But it does not operate with a clearly defined hierarchical structure, Ramsey said.

“Tren de Aragua has become more like a brand that any group of carjackers from Miami down to Argentina can invoke to further their criminal activity, but there’s really no clear sense of hierarchy,” he said. “And the reality is that Tren de Aragua has not always gotten along with the Maduro government: We saw just a few years ago, the military in 2023, stormed a prison that Tren de Aragua controlled and allegedly carried out extrajudicial executions.”

And Tulsi is trying to silence experts with unbridled Orwellian claims that up is down — that the single FBI assessment, assessing moderate contacts — says that TdA is acting with Venezuelan support, a claim that even still falls well short of what Trump claimed in his declaration.

Tulsi built her entire career around opposing the wars that Dick Cheney ginned up two decades ago. Now, in Cheneyesque fashion, she’s grotesquely inventing a war that doesn’t exist so she can help Trump destroy the Constitution.

Update: In a CO case granting two detainees a Temporary Restraining Order forbidding their deportation under the AEA, Judge Charlotte Sweeny said this about the AEA:

According to Petitioners, the Proclamation exceeds the President’s “statutory authority in three critical respects.” ECF No. 2 at 11. First, there is no “invasion or predatory incursion.” Id. Second, any purported invasion is not perpetuated by a “foreign government or nation.” Id. And third, there is “no process to contest whether an individual falls within the Proclamation.” Id. Skepticism of the Proclamation’s contrary findings is required, Petitioners urge, to the point of satisfying their first TRO burden. Id.; see also M.G., 117 F.4th at 1238. The Court agrees.

That said, Sweeny’s analysis did not focus on the relationship between Tren de Aragua and the Maduro regime.

Petitioners contend, as with its failures to identify an “invasion” or “predatory incursion,” the Proclamation likewise fails to assert a “foreign nation or government” is “invading the United States.” ECF No. 2 at 14. The Court agrees with Petitioners. The Court discerns little reason to linger on this point, especially where, as Petitioners observe, the Proclamation finds TdA is “closely aligned with [and] infiltrated[] the Maduro regime.” Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, 90 FR 13033. The Proclamation does not find TdA itself is a foreign nation, country, or government. At bottom, the Proclamation fails to adequately find or assert TdA is a “foreign nation or government,” § 21, sufficient to justify the Act’s invocation. Indeed, if TdA was such a “foreign nation or government,” id., there would be no need for it to “undertak[e] hostile actions . . . at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua, 90 FR 13033 (emphasis added).

Rather, in lengthier analysis, she focused on the absence of military invasion. She did not rely on Ratcliffe’s comment, but she could have.

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Whiskey Pete Hegseth Finally Finds Some White Men to Purge

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Amid all the other news, the purge of suspected leakers Pete Hegseth announced last month has netted three targets — all white men, for a change! Politico has not only provided a roster, but described the scope of the leak investigation.

The Pentagon put a third top official on administrative leave Wednesday as part of a wide-ranging leak investigation, according to a defense official and a person familiar with the matter.

Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, was suspended a day after two other political appointees were placed on leave following a probe into potential leaks of sensitive information.

The leaks under investigation include [1] military operational plans for the Panama Canal, [2] a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, [3] Elon Musk’s controversial visit to the Pentagon to discuss China and a [4] pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine, according to the official.

[snip]

Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Darin Selnick, the Defense Department’s deputy chief of staff, were escorted out of the Pentagon by security officers and had their building access suspended pending further investigation, the official said. Caldwell and Selnick both previously worked at Concerned Veterans for America, the nonprofit that Hegseth once led. [my annotation]

An Air Force Special Forces Command Chief Master Sergeant was also removed on Monday, though no one has said the investigation described to be targeting him is Pete Hegseth’s purge.

When this investigation was first reported by CNN, it focused on the disclosure to NYT, for a story published on March 20  [1], that Hegseth was about to give Elon Musk a briefing on US war plans against China.

The memo comes after President Donald Trump pushed back on a New York Times report that DOGE head Elon Musk would be briefed on US military plans for a potential war with China while at the Pentagon on Friday. Trump said he wouldn’t show such plans “to anybody.”

And surely that’s a big focus of this investigation. As news of these ousters broke, Marc Caputo released a story ret-conning Trump’s unhappiness with the briefing, claiming, against all sense, that Trump got mad at Elon but not, also, Hegseth about it.

  1. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suspended two top Pentagon officials, Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick, as part of an investigation into who leaked word of a planned top-secret briefing on China for Elon Musk.
  2. Axios learned that Musk or Hegseth didn’t just decide to call off that briefing after the leak. President Trump himself ordered staffers to kill it.
  • “What the f**k is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn’t go,” Trump said, a top official recalled to Axios.

Why it matters: Musk has annoyed several administration officials with his constant presence at the White House, his haphazard social media posts and his slash-and-burn tactics at his Department of Government Efficiency.

  • The planned Pentagon briefing, however, got him cross with the boss at the Resolute Desk.

Anyway, no one made sure Elon “doesn’t go;” the currently operative story is Elon went to the Pentagon, but didn’t get the briefing. If Trump were unhappy with the planned briefing, rather than its exposure, I doubt we’d have this kind of leak investigation, which purportedly prevented the briefing from happening.

But Politico mentions three more leaks targeted by the investigation:

  • A widely disseminated story [1] disclosing that DOD had developed military plans targeting the Panama Canal; NBC’s story was published March 13.
  • The deployment [2] of the USS Carl Vinson from Asia to the Red Sea; the Politico version, which noted USNI reported the news first, was like USNI’s report dated March 21. Both versions report the move first as a month-long extension of the deployment of the USS Harry S. Truman, which was damaged and then repaired in February after being struck by a merchant ship, with the Vinson sailing from East China to the Red Sea to overlap with it. On March 16, the Houthis attempted to attack the Truman in retaliation for the strikes on March 15 ordered up by Pete Hegseth’s signal chat, and potential Houthi disinformation has very recently claimed the Truman has been struck.
  • Stories [4] about a pause in intelligence sharing with Ukraine that were quickly and publicly confirmed by John Ratcliffe; here’s Politico’s March 5 version, bylined by one of the guys closely tracking the purge.

So in order, the leaks are:

  • March 5 story on Ukraine intelligence sharing
  • March 13 story on targeting Panama
  • March 20 story on the Elon briefing
  • March 21 story on the Vinson redeployment from the East China Sea to the Middle East

With that list in mind, let’s look at several aspects of the memo, dated the same day as the Vinson deployment, March 21, asking for the investigation.

It does, in fact, identify, “unauthorized disclosures of national security information involving sensitive communications with principals within the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” plural. So while the coverage focused on the Elon briefing, it reportedly entailed the others from the start, including the seemingly routine report on the Vinson deployment.

It not only mentioned “sensitive communications with principals within the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” but it asked for cooperation from “those responsible for maintaining and overseeing information security systems and in coordination with federal partners as required.” At first, in the days before Jeff Goldberg revealed Pete Hegseth conducts these discussions (including discussions about the Middle East operations like the Vinson deployment) via Signal chat, it seemed this might have been an investigation into DOD’s secure communications.

But given the inclusion of Dan Caldwell — the guy whom Hegseth instructed Mike Waltz to add as his representative to the famous Signal chat — as the first guy purged suggests this leak investigation could also be about the Signal chat.

Or other Signal chats. Mike Waltz apparently did this all the time.

American Oversight’s lawsuit seeking to preserve the signal chats Goldberg published already disclosed that the actual content of the chats did not get preserved on John Ratcliffe’s personal phone, and that between March 26 and March 28 — after Congress was already investigating — participants changed message settings.

In a filing asking James Boasberg to find that Ratcliffe defied his order submitted yesterday, American Oversight included this timeline of what we know from filings in that suit:

March 24: Excerpts of the Signal chat appear in The Atlantic.1

March 25: American Oversight files this action. On the same day, Defendant Ratcliffe testifies before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding his use of Signal.2

March 26: American Oversight files a motion for temporary restraining order. ECF No. 6. The same day, changes occur in the Signal chat “participants’ administrative settings . . . such as profile names and message settings.” Suppl. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-3. Also on the same day, The Atlantic publishes further excerpts from the Signal chat.3

March 27: This Court orders Defendants to “promptly make best efforts to preserve all Signal communications from March 11–15, 2025.” Min. Order, Mar. 27, 2025. The same day, the CIA’s Office of General Counsel reportedly issued a litigation hold notice. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 10-3.

March 28: Changes occur again in the Signal chat participants’ profile names and message settings. Suppl. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-3.

March 31: Defendant Ratcliffe’s Signal account is “reviewed” for the first time and found to contain no substantive messages from the Signal chat. Suppl. Blankenship Decl. ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-3.

1 See Jeffrey Goldberg, The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans, The Atlantic (Mar. 24, 2025), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trumpadministration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/.

2 Sen. Select Comm. on Intel. Hr’g to Examine Worldwide Threats Tr., Mar. 25, 2025, available at https://www.dia.mil/Portals/110/Images/News/DIA%20in%20the%20News/Committee_Hearing _2025.pdf.

3 See Jeffrey Goldberg & Shane Harris, Here Are the Attack Plans that Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal, The Atlantic (March 26, 2025), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegsethgoldberg/682176.

All of that took place after Hegseth himself ordered an investigation into leaks including the extension of the Harry S. Truman deployment to fight the Houthis on March 21, the kind of thing that might have been on that Signal chat.

While American Oversight didn’t ask for any other declarations, it did note that the existing declarations [docket] raise real questions about who else, including Whiskey Pete, might have deleted these texts from their devices.

For example, rather than specifying which messages were preserved, the Supplemental DoD Declaration vaguely references the preservation of “existing Signal application messages,” which, as shown by the Supplemental Blankenship Declaration, could be none. Suppl. Bennett Decl. ¶ 2, ECF No. 15-1. Similarly, without specifying whether any substantive messages were preserved, the Supplemental State Declaration merely states that “images of the Signal chat”—including “any” images captured from the Secretary’s devices—have been preserved. See Decl. of Timothy J. Kootz ¶ 4, ECF No. 15-4. As with CIA, those “images of the Signal chat” may simply be the title of the group chat. The Supplemental State Declaration also suggests that Secretary Rubio accessed the Signal chat from multiple devices. Id. More broadly, the evidentiary issues identified in the Supplemental Blankenship Declaration raise substantial questions regarding what these other Defendants actually preserved.

In forthcoming filings, American Oversight will probe the clear deficiencies in Defendants’ recordkeeping practices evidenced by these standout omissions of whether and what substantive messages from the Signal chat still exist, as well as when and how any such messages were lost. [my emphasis]

All of which brings me to the last detail of the original leak announcement that has always struck me: it was set up not as conventional leak investigations are, as a referral to the FBI based on stories that include classified information. That’s how you find out who leaked what if you want all possible culprits involved. Rather, it was set up such that Hegseth himself would get reports on the findings, and from that point, the criminal referrals would go out.

This investigation will commence immediately and culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense. The report will include a complete record of unauthorized disclosures within the Department of Defense and recommendations to improve such efforts. I expect to be informed immediately if this effort results in information identifying a party responsible for an unauthorized disclosure, and that such information will be referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution. [my emphasis]

That is, this so-called leak investigation implicating the guy Hegseth would add to his inappropriate Signal chats was set up such that Hegseth himself gets to gatekeep who gets targeted by it.

He appears to have set it up that way, importantly, before he realized a journalist had witnessed him add Dan Caldwell to a Signal chat on which he himself would disseminate battle information to the personal cell phones of multiple list participants, including journalist Jeff Goldberg.

Update: Adding this for timeline considerations. Roger Wicker and Jack Reed asked DOD IG to investigate this on March 27, while participants in the Signal chat were altering names and retention.

[W]e ask that you conduct an inquiry into, and provide us with an assessment of, the following:

1. The facts and circumstances surrounding the above referenced Signal chat incident, including an accounting of what was communicated and any remedial actions taken as a result;

2. Department of Defense (DOD) policies and adherence to policies relating to government officers and employees sharing sensitive and classified information on non-government networks and electronic applications;

3. An assessment of DOD classification and declassification policies and processes and whether these policies and processes were adhered to;

4. How the policies of the White House, Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and other Departments and agencies represented on the National Security Council on this subject differ, if at all;

5. An assessment of whether any individuals transferred classified information, including operational details, from classified systems to unclassified systems, and if so, how;

6. Any recommendations to address potential issues identified.

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Clean on OpSec: Pete Hegseth Spilled Specific Details of an Attack in Advance

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The Atlantic has published the texts (except for one naming a CIA officer whose name John Ratcliffe insists is not classified) it earlier withheld.

The White House is frantically spinning, claiming these attack plans — the likes of which both Tulsi Gabbard and Ratcliffe claimed not to recall in sworn testimony yesterday — don’t amount to “war plans.”

Karoline Leavitt is even sniping at the Wall Street Journal for its shock that Steve Witkoff was on the Signal chat thread while meeting with Putin at the Kremlin.

A real security scandal is that the Signal chat apparently included Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s envoy to wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Press reports say Mr. Witkoff was receiving these messages on the commercial app while in Moscow. This is security malpractice. Russian intelligence services must be listening to Mr. Witkoff’s every eyebrow flutter. This adds to the building perception that Mr. Witkoff, the President’s friend from New York, is out of his depth in dealing with world crises.

The meaning of Leavitt’s rebuttal is not remotely clear.

.@SteveWitkoff
was provided a secure line of communication by the U.S. Government, and it was the only phone he had in his possession while in Moscow.

If the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board cared about the truth, they could have reached out to our team for comment before running these lies.

This is classic Fake News from an outlet clearly determined to knock Steve Witkoff, who is a great patriot working effectively on behalf of President Trump to secure world peace.

She’s not denying he had Signal on the device with which he traveled (nor explained what devices he has had on his other international travels).

Update: Witkoff makes it more clear. The personal phone on which he was discussing military operations was at home.

I am incredulous that a good newspaper like the@WSJ would not check with me as to whether I had any personal devices with me on either of my trips to Moscow. If they had, they would have known the truth. Which is, I only had with me a secure phone provided by the government for special circumstances when you travel to regions where you do not want your devices compromised. That is why CBS News reported that Goldberg himself said that he “has not recounted Witkoff making any comments in that group chat until Saturday, after he left Russia and returned to the U.S.”. Guess why? Because I had no access to my personal devices until I returned from my trip. That is the responsible way for me to make these trips and that is how I always conduct myself. Maybe it is time for media outlets like the Journal to acknowledge when some of their people make serious reporting mistakes like this. I would appreciate it if the WSJ and other media outlets check with me the next time they make serious allegations. Thank you.

The desperate panic to deny the gravity of this situation, however, is a real testament to the contempt in which the White House holds the men and women whose lives were put at risk — may still be at risk — because their Defense Secretary is so incompetent he can’t bother with the least little OpSec.

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Seven Reasons Trump’s Entire National Security Team Should Resign in Disgrace

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The White House, with the help of Politico, is trying to make National Security Adviser Mike Waltz the fall guy for adding Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg to the Signal thread on which they planned war strikes against Yemen.

Nothing is decided yet, and White House officials cautioned that President Donald Trump would ultimately make the decision over the next day or two as he watches coverage of the embarrassing episode.

A senior administration official told POLITICO on Monday afternoon that they are involved in multiple text threads with other administration staffers on what to do with Waltz, following the bombshell report that the top aide inadvertently included Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a private chat discussing a military strike on Houthis.

“Half of them saying he’s never going to survive or shouldn’t survive,” said the official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberation. And two high-level White House aides have floated the idea that Waltz should resign in order to prevent the president from being put in a “bad position.”

“It was reckless not to check who was on the thread. It was reckless to be having that conversation on Signal. You can’t have recklessness as the national security adviser,” the official said.

Mind you, the knives have been out for Waltz already, and the notion that he was in touch with a Neocon journalist like Goldberg would only help those already trying to oust Waltz make the case that he’s not on Trump’s America First agenda.

And Politico doesn’t mention whether its sources were also on the Signal thread, and whether their discussions about making Waltz take the fall were done on Signal.

It is a transparent attempt to make a major breach — potentially a crime — into something else, the forgivable error of adding the wrong person to a chat thread.

This cover story, that this is just a reckless mistake about adding the wrong person to a Signal thread, also happens to be the line Trump’s closest allies in the Senate and the few Fox News hosts Trump hasn’t already hired into his Administration are parroting on TV.

1. Waltz set up a Signal chat to make war plans without verifying the ID of those included

To be sure, it was pretty boneheaded that Waltz didn’t better verify the people he was first adding to Signal and then putting on a “principles [sic] group” to plan war strikes.

On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me.

[snip]

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”

A message to the group, from “Michael Waltz,” read as follows: “Team – establishing a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting in the Sit Room this morning for action items and will be sending that out later this evening.”

Note, at about the time Waltz made this list, 11:28 PM Moscow time, list member Steve Witkoff was meeting with Putin, after having been left waiting for hours.

So yeah, Trump’s National Security Adviser exercised little diligence about how he set up a list to carry on highly classified conversations involving people’s cell phones, including cell phones that might be in Russia.

2. The entire national security team participated in a potential violation of the Espionage Act

But the effort to claim this is just a mistake in the creation of the Signal list is an attempt to downplay that Trump’s CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, sent the identity of a currently serving intelligence officer and later sent what appears to be sources and methods on Signal, and then his Secretary of Defense, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, sent operational details of the imminent strikes on Yemen on Signal, and then Waltz himself sent out what sound like the immediate results of the operation, also on Signal.

All those men, who loudly condemned Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden for their unintentional mishandling of classified information, who demanded that DOJ prosecute such lapses, sent information on an insecure chat that happened to include a journalist.

18 USC 793(f) makes it a crime to so negligently mishandle National Defense Information that someone not authorized to receive it does receive it.

(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

And yet Trump’s entire national security team — not only his National Security Adviser and his CIA Director and his Secretary of Defense, but also his Chief of Staff, his Secretary of State, his Vice President, his Director of National Intelligence, and others — did nothing as the entire team shared information about an upcoming and recently completed military attack, on Signal.

The entire gang was in on it.

3. [Trump claims] his entire national security team may have committed a crime and also an embarrassing story was about to break but no one told him

When Trump was first asked about the story, he played dumb, claiming he didn’t know anything about it.

I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. But I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?

Sure, this is almost certainly a lie. Goldberg says he told the White House about it at 9AM yesterday morning.

But now that Trump has told the lie, he has also claimed that after his entire national security team learned that a journalist may have witnessed them engage in behavior that might violate the Espionage Act, none of them told him — not JD Vance, not Mike Waltz, not Susie Wiles, not the NSC spox who gave on the record confirmation that the thread was authentic — none of them alerted Trump to the breach. Trump would further have you believe that none of them told him — not JD Vance, not Mike Waltz, not Susie Wiles, not the NSC spox who gave on the record confirmation that the thread was authentic — that an incredibly damaging story was about to drop.

If that were true it would mean Trump could trust no one to keep him informed of the most basic things. It would mean his entire national security team fucked up and kept it a secret from him.

4. DOD attacked a foreign country based on Stephen Miller’s feels of Trump’s intent

One weird line in the Atlantic story describes how Stephen Miller (Trump’s domestic policy advisor, not formally on his foreign policy team) interpreted Trump’s views from a prior meeting in the Situation Room, and Miller’s interpretation was all it took to affirm Trump’s intent to launch strikes on Yemen.

At this point, the previously silent “S M” joined the conversation. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

That message from “S M”—presumably President Trump’s confidant Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, or someone playing Stephen Miller—effectively shut down the conversation. The last text of the day came from “Pete Hegseth,” who wrote at 9:46 a.m., “Agree.”

This entire operation was — is, still — being authorized solely on Presidential authority.

But the Presidential authority, the thing that gives it some cover of law, amounts to Stephen Miller’s feels about the President’s intent.

That’s a pretty flimsy basis on which to launch military strikes.

5. Hegseth lied when caught

All this broke as Pete Hegseth was flying to Hawaii, his first trip to Asia as Defense Secretary (if he makes it that far).

When asked about sending war plans on a thread that included a journalist, Hegseth lied, claiming no one had been texting war plans. (In a truly spectacular touch, Hegseth put the video of himself lying up on his “DOD Rapid Response” Xitter account, after which it promptly got fact-checked.

I get that these underqualified right wing white men never take personal accountability for their actions.

But this undermines whatever leadership credibility Hegseth otherwise might have had.

The military requires accountability from its leaders.

Hegseth refused to take any.

6. Waltz set the threads to autodelete, likely deliberately defying the Presidential Records Act

According to Goldberg, Mike Waltz set the text threads to auto-delete.

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

Not only would deleting this thread without creating a record violate the Presidential and Federal Records Acts, but that’s probably why they were sending war plans on Signal.

That is, the most likely reason why Trump’s entire national security team was using an insecure platform to plan war strikes was to ensure there were no embarrassing records for posterity, a violation of the law.

7. The entire national security team may have committed a crime in plain sight but Pam Bondi and Kash Patel won’t investigate

Pam Bondi was admittedly busy yesterday making multiple TV appearances in which she scolded Jasmine Crockett for opposing Elon Musk’s efforts to dismantle the government.

In none of them did she say she was opening an investigation into whether Mike Waltz or any of the other people on the list violated the Espionage Act or any other laws.

Who are we kidding? There’s no way Bondi or Kash Patel will investigate this (though they too criticized Biden and Hillary about classified information).

And that, in and of itself, is reason why Bondi and Patel should resign in disgrace. Because even in the face of a humiliating security breach, they’ll do nothing to hold Trump’s people accountable.

Update: I watched the Threats hearing at which Tulsi and John Ratcliffe testified. Both seem to be claiming that nothing they posted was classified, but they defer to DOD regarding whether anything Whiskey Pete shared was classified. Clearly Whiskey Pete has retroactively declassified material to cover up his possible crime.

Of note, Ratcliffe did not know (and seemed surprised) that Steve Witkoff was in Russia during the period of the list. And Tulsi admitted she had been overseas during the period as well; she did a trip to the Pacific, including stops in Hawaii, Japan, Thailand, India and France.

Finally, Tulsi freely agreed to have her own use of Signal (and other encrypted apps) audited to make sure she’s not doing anything impermissible; Ratcliffe was cagier, and said only he’d do so if NSC agreed.

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The Classified Information John Ratcliffe, Pete Hegseth, and Mike Waltz Sent to Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg

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If you’re like me, you’ll keep checking when reading this story about how Mike Waltz added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat of top Trump officials planning war strikes on Yemen to see if it’s the Onion.

But it’s not.

It’s real.

Mike Waltz really did add a journalist to a chat (including Marco Rubio, who was a big player in the Butter Emails fun) planning war strikes on Yemen.

To make things easier to understand the risk of all this, I wanted to pull out what kinds of highly classified information these people shared with a journalist.

First, CIA Director John Ratcliffe sent the identify of a currently serving intelligence officer.

One more person responded: “John Ratcliffe” wrote at 5:24 p.m. with the name of a CIA official to be included in the group. I am not publishing that name, because that person is an active intelligence officer.

Then, Ratcliffe sent what sound like sources and methods.

Then, at 8:26 a.m., a message landed in my Signal app from the user “John Ratcliffe.” The message contained information that might be interpreted as related to actual and current intelligence operations.

Then, Whiskey Pete Hegseth (who says trans service members are not fit to serve, but thinks he himself is fit to run DOD), sent operational details of the strikes on Yemen about to start.

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

Finally, Waltz sent what sound like the immediate results of the operation.

I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.”

Miek Waltz is the one who added Goldberg to the chat. He also set at least some of them to auto delete.

Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.

Finally, Goldberg notes that by definition, they could not have had their phones in a SCIF, so all were sharing information outside the security guidelines mandated for this kind of information.

Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

I guess this is what we should expect from an Administration led by a guy who stored nuclear documents in his bathroom.

Not a single one of the people involved in this thread exhibits the least competence for the job.

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Trump’s Slop and Ouch First Week

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Trump’s failson practically wet himself with a Tweet bragging about what CIA Director John Ratcliffe accomplished on his first day at the office.

Given John Brennan’s 2023 testimony that stood by the opinion expressed in the letter, Jr’s claim he “lied” may well be legally actionable (and Brennan said then, as he did the other day, that the only reason he retained his clearance was for intelligence officials to be able to consult with him). Plus, many if not most of the people from whom Ratcliffe “strip[ped] security clearances” didn’t have them; the most impotent kind of signaling possible. But it worked for Trump’s failson!

Jr also makes a big deal of the fact that John Ratcliffe, without explaining the meaning of a “low confidence” assessment, released a report that his predecessor, William Burns, ordered up.

Jr was, like mediocre men are wont to do, grading Ratcliffe on a curve. And that was his idea of a big win.

Trump has overtly pitched a claim he’s engaged in Shock and Awe (and, given the widespread adoption of the term, seems to be pushing a similar campaign to the press). While the attention on Trump’s attack on rule of law and marginalized people is absolutely merited, in addition to wowing a captive press, Trump’s declaration of Shock and Awe has shifted the focus away from ways that Trump has affirmatively hurt Americans, including, undoubtedly, a great number of his own supporters, what I’m dubbing his Slop and Ouch campaign.

Trump halt on NIH funding literally shut down cancer treatment already in process (ironically, since Trump claimed he was attacking Joe Biden’s “cancer” when signing many of his Executive Orders). Cancer doesn’t doesn’t discriminate against MAGAts. Shutting down cancer trials may literally be taking away a Trump’s supporter’s latest hope of a cure.

Trump’s attacks on Biden’s efforts to lower drug prices may lead to higher costs for generic prices and could even lead to higher prices for diabetes drugs (setting aside any impact threatened tariffs on Denmark would have on Ozempic prices).

Trump reversed access to wind power, which has become cheaper than fossil fuels. This will force American consumers to pay more for dirtier fuel. Foreign competitors are already licking their lips about the competitive advantage it gives them.

Trump’s attack on programs focused on environmental justice will harm poor rural communities.

And after spending four years declaring one after another infrastructure week only to have Joe Biden deliver it right away, Trump is threatening the funding for bridge and road projects already underway. He’s taking away what he promised — but failed to deliver — during his first term.

His rescission of job offers throughout government (though Veterans groups were able to get a reversal on VA care) has left thousands stuck with their lives in limbo, with movers arriving but no job to move to on the other end.

Trump’s attack on public health even as Avian Flu threatens to snowball will exacerbate the already increasing price of eggs — which Trump himself made a key campaign plank.

And because he is choosing to pursue his deportation policy in the stupidest way possible, it is creating problems. HCI detained three people in a Newark raid with out a warrant, reportedly including a Puerto Rican and a veteran. And Mexico refused a landing request for a deportation flight on a military plane (it accepted four others that were on chartered flights, which cost less to run and may have greater capacity; also, Colombia has since blocked a military transport flight); military flights to Guatemala avoided Mexican airspace, suggesting Mexico refused overflight requests as well. Trump is also claiming repatriation flights are instead deportation flights in false claims that he’s delivering on his promise of mass deportation. And the single stay stats many are boasting about aren’t higher than some days during 2022. Despite his claims of Shock and Awe, Trump has had to lie to support his claims he succeeded in doing the one thing he has prioritized most.

And all that’s before the inflationary effect of deporting those who pick America’s food and build her homes.

None of this takes away from the grave damage Trump did in his first week, particularly to those like Trans people and migrants he is trying to treat as unpersons.

I don’t mean to minimize the ways this is going to get far worse. It will get far worse. It will devastate the lives of a lot of vulnerable people.

There’s nothing good about the fact that, in addition to all the people Trump has deliberately targeted for cruelty, Trump has also inflicted real damage on his own supporters. But it’s a sign of one direction where this could head, particularly as a dumbing down of government hires in favor of sycophants starts degrading efficacy.

An ideology that places grievance above all else — an ideology that is willing to hurt America if that’s what it takes to reverse the successes of the Biden Administration — is an ideology guaranteed to impose pain far beyond those targeted for spectacle and cruelty.

Underneath Trump’s Shock and Awe that is doing grave damage to the Constitution and Trump’s marginalized targets, there’s a Slop and Ouch that targets everyone this side of his billionaire friends. And that needs to remain visible, too.

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“This is a rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible:” Jim Jordan-Led Investigation Discredits John Ratcliffe

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In his latest effort to use the House Judiciary Committee as a goon squad to intimidate Donald Trump’s enemies, Jim Jordan actually developed proof that John Ratcliffe — and not the 51 former spooks he was after — inappropriately politicized intelligence to manufacture debate props.

And then Jordan did it himself.

I have the perfectly curated Xitter account to learn when Jim Jordan has released his latest installment of weaponization against democracy.

Last week, he issued his latest attempt to make a scandal out of the true free speech of the 51 former spooks who wrote a letter saying that the release of a Hunter Biden laptop days before the election “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” My replies were overrun with trolls chanting incoherent claims.

Of course the trolls in my Xitter feed didn’t know the most basic details of the letter or known facts about the copy of a hard drive referred to as a Hunter Biden laptop:

  • The former spooks didn’t say this was disinformation, no matter how many times Jordan or Glenn Greenwald lie and say they did. In fact, they specifically caveated that they didn’t know if the emails were genuine and did not have evidence of Russian involvement.
  • Nothing revealed about the laptop or the hard drives purportedly based on the laptop rules out Russian involvement. That’s true, in part, because the FBI never bothered to test the laptop to see if anything had been added, never indexed it, and when introduced at trial, the summary witness specifically said she had not looked for signs of tampering. Plus, there were enough Russian drug and sex workers in close proximity to earlier Hunter Biden laptop compromises to allow for a role, particularly in packaging up the device.
  • As the Democratic rebuttal notes, the 51 spook letter couldn’t have caused the social media companies to throttle the original New York Post story without a time machine, as Twitter and Facebook had stopped throttling the story several days before the letter was published. Linear time. It’s like magic to these trolls.

Even though Jordan’s latest report substantiates absolutely no misconduct, the trolls nevertheless yapped and yapped about it. Jordan showed:

  • While Mike Morrell did target the letter to the last debate (the same one where Trump invited Tony Bobulinski to make claims that have not held up), the other participants were not doing this for the Biden campaign; they were doing it to speak out against Russian interference in the 2020 election
  • The former spooks couldn’t have leaked classified information because none of them were read into pertinent information regarding the Russian spies cultivating Rudy Giuliani
  • The former spooks got preclearance to publish the letter via the normal process
  • After preclearance, the letter was forwarded for Gina Haspel’s attention, but neither she nor anyone else thought it was more important than vaccinating the CIA workforce
  • Some of the people involved were private citizens with contracts that did not strip them of their free speech

In other words, the 51 spooks followed the rules, and Jordan was stuck trying to turn it into a scandal.

The Jordan report was only 31 pages and, like a college freshman composition paper, blew entire pages with big screen caps repeating the complaints of two random spooks complaining about “random signatures” on the letter and some discussion of Mark Polymeropoulos getting something excluded from a follow-up.

Polymeropoulos’ attorney, Mark Zaid, explained that CIA redacted two lines, which had nothing to do with Hunter Biden, from the Polymeropoulos follow-up — but that was precisely how preclearance is supposed to work.

Mr. Polymeropolous submitted to the PCRB a two page talking points memo about the subject matter. Obviously, he knew that there was going to be media attention concerning the issue and he wanted to be properly prepared to address the topic if asked. He followed the standard procedure for review of information intended to be made public. No different than any other individual who has a prepublication review requirement. As part of its review, which was handled in the normal timely fashion for such a short document, CIA redacted two lines of information as being classified. Those two lines had nothing to do with the Hunter Biden laptop specifically and concerned Mr. Polymeropolous’ background experience with Russia and a comment concerning that country’s activities generally. Of course, that information was properly protected by Mr. Polymeropolous and never used. To say that this constituted an attempt to use classified information is farcical and reflects a complete lack of understanding how the prepublication review process works. The system operated exactly how it was supposed to and is being distorted for political purposes.

That’s it. That’s the best Jordan could rush out to give Trump something to complain about in a presidential debate over and over.

To think that I would, in front of generals and others, say suckers and losers – we have 19 people that said it was never said by me. It was made up by him, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was made up, just like the 51 intelligence agents are made up, just like the new thing with the 16 economists are talking.

It’s the same thing. Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation. It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter. It wasn’t Russia disinformation. He made up the suckers and losers, so he should apologize to me right now.

[snip]

I’ve dealt with politicians all my life. I’ve been on this side of the equation for the last eight years. I’ve never seen anybody lie like this guy. He lies – I’ve never seen it. He could look you in the face. So – and about so many other things, too.

And we mentioned the laptop, We mentioned “Russia, Russia, Russia,” “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.” And everything he does is a lie. It’s misinformation and disinformation. The “losers and suckers” story that he made up is a total lie on the military. It’s a disgrace.

This was Trump’s prepackaged answer to attempt to projection his own lying onto Biden. It was barely more vigorous than Biden’s rebuttals.

As flimsy as it was, though, Trump’s use of the 51-spook letter was part of a larger effort, one designed to bully those who speak up against Russian disinformation, disinformation generally, or in favor of rule of law. As John Brennan described, it created a furor about the letter that distracted from Russian intervention, which in turn serves to divide the country.

I think the firestorm, the furor has been created responding to the letter as opposed to the letter itself, as I responded to one of the Congressmen earlier. So it’s unfortunate that this is taking up all your time, it’s taking up my time, and it is, again, further dividing the country.

And, by design, it has chilled speech that talks about Russian interference.

One after another of the spooks interviewed confessed they or others would be chilled by the precedent of Jordan investigating private citizens for their free speech. Kristin Wood described how Mike Flynn put out all their names on a Telegram chat, leading to stalking and death threats.

Several ways. First of all, I’ve received death threats. I’ve received vicious calls, texts, emails from all sorts of random people. Mike Flynn — General Flynn posted on Telegram all of our names and said, you know, let them know how we feel. It unleashed this viciousness that had several other folks calling the police, calling the Threat Management Unit at CIA, to let them know what was happening.

And so for the first time ever, I looked at getting a gun and getting a concealed carry permit because it’s not just that people have been mean or say horrific things, but we’ve seen them take action. And so that feeling of vulnerability for speaking, exercising a First Amendment right, and for saying what I thought was as obvious as there’s air in — there’s air. Let’s just let the FBI do their work.

It has a profound effect on health as well. I’ve been to the emergency room for stress because of all of this. And so when you ask would I do this again, I would insist on a little more precision of language. But it has the effect of censoring people who have more than a thousand years of experience in this topic. And I would think the focus would be on stopping Russia and not on what feels like persecution.

Several of the spooks admitted the mob treatment would lead them to decline further involvement in anything political. Most described that it would chill others.

At that level, the spooks are just like the disinformation experts Jordan also targeted, those who tracked efforts to muddy reason and truth. Their lives have been upended because they attempted to track Russian disinformation that served Republican interests, and the personal and financial cost is shutting down those efforts during an election year.

But then something funny happened.

House Republicans kept pushing the spooks, arguing — notwithstanding the public reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to solicit dirt from known Russian agent Andrii Derkach — that the spooks should have known, somehow, that the hard drive called a Hunter Biden laptop wasn’t Russian disinformation (which, as noted, the spooks didn’t claim).

Republicans — often Jordan himself — kept asking whether the spooks knew that John Ratcliffe had claimed the laptop was not disinformation (which, again, was not what the letter claimed).

Chairman Jordan. Were you aware of Mr. Ratcliffe’s statement on the morning of the 19th, prior to the letter being sent, where he said in an interview on FOX News that morning that this is not part of the Russian disinformation campaign?

And that led multiple witnesses to explain why Ratcliffe simply wasn’t credible. Wood described that a proper counterintelligence investigation takes longer than would have transpired (no one knew how long the FBI had had the laptop).

Ms. Wood. So, I think what I would say in response to that is that the letter — the purpose of the letter was to say, Let’s not rush to judgment. Everyone, regardless of who they are as Americans, deserves due process. Let’s let the FBI do their work. And when DNI Ratcliffe said that — so as you have seen from all of these investigations, right, they take a very long time to do, to do the considered judgment of 17 or 18 intelligence agencies, and to come up with that to do the exhaustive search of asking new sources, of pulling in every bit of signals intelligence, there’s just no way that’s possible to have been done in the timeframe in which that statement was made. So our whole point was to say, Be careful here. Let us — we don’t know if this is all real. We don’t know if all the emails are real, and we don’t know if this is tied to the Russians. Let’s let the process work

James Clapper described that, not only didn’t he consider Ratcliffe a reliable source, but that he made the statement before any investigation of the laptop.

Mr. Clapper. Well, if the Department of Justice or the FBI or some other legitimate credible source of — who had done a credible forensic analysis — certainly I would accept that. That’s why I suggested that would be a good — would have been a good fix — a good addition to the letter had we said that.

Mr. Gaetz. Are you aware of Director Ratcliffe, the DNI at the time, contradicting the thrust of this letter you signed?

Mr. Clapper. Well, okay. He said that statement before, I think, an investigation had begun of the laptop. So I don’t know where he’s coming from making a statement like that.

In response to a follow-up question from the Minority, Clapper also agreed that Ratcliffe himself was making public statements in anticipation of the debate.

Q It’s an article reporting on Ratcliffe’s remarks, and it’s dated October 19th, 2020, 1:49 p.m. And we’re just introducing it for the fact of the date. The New York Post story in question was released on October 14th, correct?

A Yes.

Q So that would have been 5 days before Ratcliffe made his remarks?

A Right.

Q And I think you said earlier he couldn’t have even begun an investigation in that time period. Is that correct?

A Correct.

Q And can you explain what you mean by that?

A Well, I don’t know how — what his basis for making that statement is when the laptop itself hasn’t been investigated. The DNI, Office of the Director National Intelligence, has no organic forensic analysis capability at all. So they’re dependent on other components of the intelligence community, in this case the FBI, to render such a judgment, which hadn’t been rendered. So I don’t know how he could make that statement.

Q Okay. And even assuming that Ratcliffe — sorry. Withdraw that. And he made these remarks on October 19th, which was the day before the second debate, correct? The second Presidential debate was the 20th.

A Uh-huh.

Q So isn’t it possible that Ratcliffe also made his remarks in the hope that they would impact the debate?

A Well, one could conclude that, yes.

John Brennan was even more disdainful of Ratcliffe’s actions. He described that Ratcliffe’s release of his briefing notes, for the first 2020 debate, made it clear that Ratcliffe was involved in politics.

Chairman Jordan. Director, were you aware of what Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on the morning of October 19th regarding this Biden laptop story, where he said that it wasn’t a Russian disinformation operation?

Mr. Brennan. I don’t know if I was aware of it at the time, but I would have dismissed it anyway.

Chairman Jordan. Why would you have dismissed it?

Mr. Brennan. Because I don’t think John Ratcliffe was an independent, objective leader of the intelligence community at the time.

Chairman Jordan. So you would dismiss the statement from the Director of National Intelligence — the Acting — the Director of National Intelligence at the time, in the administration, getting intelligence in real-time, you would just dismiss that out of hand?

Mr. Brennan. Not out of hand, but I think it was — a week or two prior to that, there was a selective release of information that included my briefing notes to President Obama in the White House Situation Room that was misrepresenting, in fact, the facts, where it was pushed out in redacted version. And I did think that was a very, very unfortunate, unprofessional, unethical engagement on the part of the Director of National Intelligence in a Presidential election.

Mr. Gaetz. So your dismissing Mr. Ratcliffe was somehow payback for the fact that you thought that your briefing to President Obama had been mischaracterized?

Mr. Brennan. No, that’s not what I said.

Mr. Gaetz. Okay. Well, I’m trying to understand how this event that seems to have aggrieved you regarding the briefing to President Obama impacted your view of the Ratcliffe assessment.

Mr. Brennan. It didn’t aggrieve me. It just indicated to me that John Ratcliffe was not going to be an independent, nonpartisan, apolitical actor.

Brennan is referring to the notes he got about materials found among hacked documents in Russia, which Republicans and John Durham spun up, first of all, as true (rather than suspected Russian disinformation), and then misrepresented to claim that Hillary had a plan to frame Donald Trump.

Not only did Brennan see this as an election season stunt (which I observed at the time), but he described that Ratcliffe “misrepresent[ed] the facts” about the materials.

Jim Jordan has been searching for a former spook to accuse of politicizing intelligence in 2020 for years, and he finally found one! Trump’s hand-picked Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, who was doing precisely what Jordan falsely accused the former spooks of doing, but did so while still an employee of the Intelligence Community.

Update: Corrected that the “laptop” was not just a “hard drive,” but in fact a copy of another hard drive.

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Donald Trump Confesses He Can’t Distinguish His Own Influence Ops from that of a Russian Spy

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To understand the startling confession at the core of Donald Trump’s motion to compel discovery submitted last night, it helps to read a caveat included in Trump’s discovery request, but not included in this motion.

In a letter requesting the same things described in the motion to compel in discovery, Trump’s team admitted it was using a different definition of “foreign influence” than the one he himself adopted in Executive Order 13848 requiring the Intelligence Community to provide a report on any, “foreign interference that targeted election infrastructure materially affect[ing] the security or integrity of that infrastructure, the tabulation of votes, or the timely transmission of election results.”

Rather than just reports of attempts to tamper with election infrastructure to alter the vote count, Trump intended his discovery request to include efforts by foreign governments and non-state actors to influence US policy.

As used herein, the term “foreign influence” is broader than the definition of the term “foreign interference” in Executive Order 13848 and includes any overt or covert effort by foreign governments and non-state actors, as well as agents and associates of foreign governments and non-state actors, intended to affect directly or indirectly a US person or policy or process of any federal, state, or local government actor or agency in the United States.

A vast majority of Trump’s discovery requests claim to need backup about intelligence on potential compromises that could not have affected the election tabulation. Not a single one in the 37-page motion addresses the specific lies the January 6 indictment accuses him of telling:

dozens of specific claims that there had been substantial fraud in certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for the Defendant to votes for Biden.

Here are some of the totally irrelevant things Trump is demanding:

  • The classified backup to the 2016 Intelligence Community assessment, which Trump claims was the source of his purported genuine concern about elections that led him to issue Executive Order 13848, when instead he was probably attempting to stave off a law, proposed by Marco Rubio and Chris Van Hollen, requiring stronger election protection measures
  • The backup to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency statement asserting that the election was the most secure in history (which led Trump to fire Chris Krebs by Tweet)
  • Details about the Solar Winds hack, which was made public after the CISA statement, and which is not known to have compromised any election infrastructure, but which Patrick Byrne offered as an excuse in real time to start seizing voting machines
  • Debates about the findings in the 2020 election report ultimately released that pertain to China’s influence operations, not interference operations
  • Details of a January 2 briefing John Ratcliffe gave Jeffrey Clark (which is not described in the indictment), which Trump insinuates is the reason that Clark strengthened language about election irregularities totally unrelated to the things described in the election report, even though — as the indictment notes — Ratcliffe, “disabused the Defendant of the notion that the Intelligence Community’s findings regarding foreign interference would change the outcome of the election”
  • The FISA Court opinion describing improper efforts to query 702 information regarding possible foreign influence — possibly directed at things like Nick Fuentes’ cryptocurrency donation and Charles Bausman’s ties to Russia — which wouldn’t have affected Trump’s lies at all

Not a single one of these items pertains to whether Ruby Freeman added votes in Fulton County, Georgia, whether 10,000 dead people voted in one or another state, whether non-citizens voted in Arizona, whether there was a vote dump of 149,772 illegal votes in Detroit, whether Pennsylvania received 700,000 more absentee ballots than they had sent out.

That is, not a single one of Trump’s main demands pertains to the specific lies he is accused of telling.

This stunt might have been effective if Trump were charged with moving to seize voting machines after the famous December 18 meeting, at which Byrne and Sidney Powell urged Trump to use EO 13848 and the discovery of the Solar Winds hack to seize voting machines. But that’s not in the indictment — the famed meeting is unmentioned. As I’ve previously noted, Powell is only in the indictment for the way in which Trump adhere to her views about Dominion, not for the December 18 meeting. In this request, Trump repeats an earlier request for investigations into Dominion in passing, but focuses his attention instead on Solar Winds.

Instead of asking for evidence pertaining to the actual lies Trump told, Trump argues that because he had the same goal and effect that Russia pursued in 2016 — to erode faith in democracy — it somehow means his own lies weren’t cynical, knowing lies.

Moreover, whereas the Special Counsel’s Office falsely alleges that President Trump “erode[d] public faith in the administration of the election,” the 2016 Election ICA uses strikingly similar language to attribute the origins of that erosion to foreign influence—that is, foreign efforts to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process.” Compare Indictment ¶ 2, with Ex. A at 1; see also id. at 6 (describing “Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest”).

The problem is that the lies Russia and Trump told in common in 2020 — primarily a false claim that Joe Biden corruptly fired a Ukrainian prosecutor — don’t have anything to do with the specific lies that Trump told to mobilize thousands of his followers to attack the Capitol.

That both Russia and Trump want to undermine democracy is not a specific defense to the charges against him.

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Columbia Journalism Review–and Now Columbia School of Journalism–Have a Russian Intelligence Problem

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On Tuesday, Columbia Journalism Review quietly staged the Zoom conference intended to address the many problems with Jeff Gerth’s series on “Russiagate” [sic], which I wrote about in a long series. After they rescheduled the original date because of an illness, they did not alert those who had previously signed up, meaning a number of people missed it. Nor did they record the event. It had the feel of a formality designed to claim they had listened, without actually doing so.

Nothing demonstrates the inadequacy of the event so well as the fact that no one — not moderator and Berkeley School of Journalism Dean Geeta Anand, not Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb, and not CJR Editor Kyle Pope — addressed the fact that Jeff Gerth had cited an unreliable Russian intelligence product as part of his attack on Hillary Clinton without informing readers he had done so.

I described that he had done so in this post, but I’m going to try to simplify this still further in hopes Columbia will understand how inexcusable this is — how badly this violates every tenet of ethical journalism.

As part of his description of Hillary’s response to being victimized in a hack-and-leak campaign, Gerth described that Clinton approved a plan to vilify Trump by making Russian interference itself a scandal.

The disclosures, while not helpful to Clinton, energized the promotion of the Russia narrative to the media by her aides and Fusion investigators. On July 24, Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, told CNN and ABC that Trump himself had “changed the platform” to become “more pro-Russian” and that the hack and dump “was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” according to unnamed “experts.”

Still, the campaign’s effort “did not succeed,” campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri would write in the Washington Post the next year. So, on July 26, the campaign allegedly upped the ante. Behind the scenes, Clinton was said to have approved a “proposal from one of her foreign-policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services,” according to notes, declassified in 2020, of a briefing CIA director John Brennan gave President Obama a few days later. [my emphasis]

The claim is a central part of Gerth’s narrative, which adopts many of the theories John Durham floated in his two failed prosecutions, suggesting that the press’ concerns about Trump and Russia stemmed exclusively from efforts — the dossier and the Alfa Bank anomaly — generated by Hillary, and not by Carter Page’s weird behavior in Moscow, Paul Manafort’s ties to oligarchs with ties to Russia, or all the lies Trump’s people told in 2017 about their own ties to Russia.

The claim is a central part of Jeff Gerth’s narrative, and it is based on a Russian intelligence product of uncertain reliability.

These are the notes of Brennan’s briefing to Obama. Here, though not in an earlier part of this section, Gerth quotes directly from the notes (though Gerth cuts the words “alleged approval”).

This is the letter John Ratcliffe wrote to Lindsey Graham about the briefing before he declassified the notes themselves. The letter quotes the notes and unlike Gerth, he does not cut the words, “alleged approval,” so there can be no doubt that that’s what Ratcliffe was addressing. Ratcliffe’s letter explicitly says that the Intelligence Community “does not know the accuracy of the allegation” or whether it was “exaggeration or fabrication.”

  • In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.
  • According to his handwritten notes, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”

It’s bad enough that Gerth takes out the use of “alleged” included in the notes itself and in Ratcliffe’s description of the report.

But it is inexcusable that Gerth does not tell readers this claim comes from a Russian intelligence report, one that even John Ratcliffe warned might not be reliable, might even be a fabrication! Gerth describes that “Clinton was said” to have formulated this plan, without telling readers that Russian spooks were the ones who said it. He simply adopts the accusation made by Russian spies without notice he had done so.

Before writing this up, I asked Kyle Pope about this twice, first in my general list of questions, then in a specific follow-up.

Finally, you did not answer this question.

Do you believe your treatment of the John Brennan briefing should have revealed the briefing was based on a Russian intelligence document? Do you believe you should have noted the John Ratcliffe warning that, “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication”? Is there a reason you’re certain the date was July 26 when it’s not clear whether it says 26 or 28?

Is it your view that CJR owes its readers neither notice that it is relying on a Russian intelligence report for its interpretations about Hillary Clinton’s motives nor reveal that the IC would not vouch for the accuracy of that report?

I got no answer. Since Tuesday’s event, I’ve since asked for comment from Dean Cobb, who provided no response, as well as Dean Anand (whose assistant said she may get back to me later).

Jeff Gerth, and through him, CJR, and through CJR, the Columbia Journalism School apparently believe it is sound journalism, in a piece that demands greater transparency from others commenting on sloppy reporting about Russia’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 election, to quote from a description of a Russian intelligence report that may have been part of that campaign to interfere in the 2016 election, without disclosing that he was doing so.

There are unretracted clear errors throughout Gerth’s piece that also went unremarked in Tuesday’s event; rather than explaining why those errors remain uncorrected in a piece complaining about the errors of others, Gerth twice claimed his was a, “very factual chronological story” with no pushback. When I asked about them before doing my piece, Pope dismissed those errors as merely a matter of opinion.

But about this undisclosed use of a Russian intelligence product that could be a fabrication, there is no dispute. It’s right there in the warning Ratcliffe gave before he released the notes. “The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” But that didn’t stop Gerth from using it. He used it anyway, with no disclosure about who made this allegation or the IC warning about its uncertain reliability.

And Columbia University’s journalism establishment stubbornly stands by that non-disclosure.

Links

CJR’s Error at Word 18

The Blind Spots of CJR’s “Russiagate” [sic] Narrative

Jeff Gerth’s Undisclosed Dissemination of Russian Intelligence Product

Jeff Gerth Declares No There, Where He Never Checked

“Wink:” Where Jeff Gerth’s “No There, There” in the Russian Investigation Went

Columbia Journalism Review–and Now Columbia School of Journalism–Have a Russian Intelligence Problem

Dear Jeff Gerth: Peter Strzok Is Not a Media Critic

My own disclosure statement

An attempted reconstruction of the articles Gerth includes in his inquiry

A list of the questions I sent to CJR

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