Accountability needed on Trump officials' Signal chat fiasco

The surprising and evidently inadvertent inclusion of a prominent national security reporter on a group text in which Trump administration officials discussed details of an imminent attack on pro-Iran Houthi rebels in Yemen spawns questions that citizens of all political stripes have reason to ask. The subject now has shifted to accountability for the mistake, which fortunately did not harm our military members.

The fiasco began a few days before the March 15 bombing when those at the top of the defense and diplomatic establishments communicated through an encrypted Signal app on their cellphones, even though the app has been hacked in the past by foreign intelligence agencies. Highly sensitive conversations are advisably conducted from a physically controlled space called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). Why wasn’t that done here?

Somehow, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to whose cell number national security adviser Mike Waltz apparently had access, was added to the chain and began receiving messages. Goldberg said it took time for him to realize this wasn’t a disinformation hoax. He withdrew from the chain after the attack started, realizing it was a real deployment of American warpower. Before publishing his account, he asked about the text chain which the National Security Council defended as “a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”

And so began the strategy by Trump and his team of dodging, deflecting, misleading, and putting up smoke screens. The discussion instead should center on why this was so dangerous and how can it be prevented from happening again.

“I don’t know anything about it,” the president claimed after Goldberg’s article was published. Later, Trump downplayed the incident. “The only glitch in two months,” he said, which “turned out not to be a serious one.” By Thursday, Trump dropped the casual tone and defaulted to his familiar, all-purpose excuse: “I think it’s all a witch hunt.”

His underlings have made tortured distinctions between “war plans” and “attack plans,” suspect assertions that “no classified materials” were shared, and unwise efforts to discredit plain facts by attacking Goldberg personally and professionally.

Even a key Republican senator is dismissing this dance. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs the armed services committee, sent a letter to the Pentagon’s acting inspector general seeking a formal probe over “the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.” That’s the right move. And a federal judge has ordered the administration to preserve group chat records, another promising step.

How did the breach happen? How vulnerable are current practices to spying and hacking? Are our allies less likely to share sensitive information now that we have shown how sloppy we are with our own? Accountability for this embarrassing incompetence by the White House and Pentagon is needed.

Otherwise, Trump is sending the wrong signals.