There are so few things in life that one may depend on with absolute certainty. The sun rising and setting is one. The need to eat, drink and sleep every day is another. And the fact that the Trump administration will create scenarios that in any other day and age would be career ending and administration toppling is another. It always.gets.worse. NPR found a memo from the Pentagon saying not to use Signal and John Bolton agreed it was incredible that Ratcliffe, Gabbard, Waltz, et al. didn’t know that.
The March 18, 2025 Pentagon memo adds, “Please note: third-party messaging apps (e.g. Signal) are permitted by policy for unclassified accountability/recall exercises but are not approved to process or store non-public unclassified information.”
The encrypted Signal app is what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other leading national security officials within the administration used to discuss bombing Houthi sites earlier this month. The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently added to the group and privy to the highly sensitive discussions.
In the military, sending classified data over insecure channels is called “spillage”; it can be a career ender for a military officer.
And rightfully so. It should be a career ender for Michael Waltz but Trump is softpedalling all this and calling it a “glitch.” Which makes perfect sense considering that the Russians are the ones trying to crack the Signal app and Steve Witkoff was likely at the Kremlin with Putin when this *leak* occurred. At least the time frames of the leak and Witkoff’s calendar indicate that conclusively. The memo went out on the 18th from the Pentagon, three days after the leak under discussion, but almost a week before the revelation of the leak. Anybody on top of Pentagon protocol would have known which way the wind was blowing, but not the Secretary of Defense, clearly.
The 2023 DoD memo prohibited use of mobile applications for even “controlled unclassified information,” which is many degrees less important than information about on-going military operations.
There’s almost no precedent for the heads of Defense, State, Intelligence and National Security to be sharing such sensitive military intelligence in a forum that was known to be unsecured.
“These are things that are absolutely basic,” John Bolton, former national security adviser during the first Trump administration, told NPR’s Here & Now. “Yet these are cabinet level people in our government, and yet not one of them ever said, ‘Why are we on Signal?’ “
