“They were lying. They knew they were lying. And now everyone knows. All that’s missing is an admission of guilt, which the press corps can be counted on to pursue. And every time reporters ask about classified information, they’re going to lie again, with new and more sensational lies, distracting us from the most consequential angle of this story.”
Did you notice that the acting Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Christopher Grady was NOT included in this conversation? Now that’s an interesting piece of news and I’m glad for it. This is someone who should be involved in war planning. He didn’t know! (And I’m betting there was some raging going on in private.) He had to have been deliberately not informed and was not involved in the chat. I‘m both glad and pissed he wasn’t included. Of course, if he *had* been, it likely would not have happened at all, and certainly not on a publicly available, hackable program. The big slap would have come out in a serious fashion.
Now let me change the subject a tiny bit. “The US secretary of defense, the US secretary of state, the vice president of the United States, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the director of national intelligence – all of them, some of them under oath, have said that there’s no way, no how any of that information contained in that group chat was classified.” Right. Baloney.
Let’s get a little technical. Legal mandates, including the Espionage Act, the Presidential Records Act, and the Records Management by Federal Agencies Act, require that ALL federal records created by the President, Vice President, cabinet agencies, and the intelligence community be preserved, protected, and produced for review by any court of jurisdiction that requires them. Under the Espionage Act, 18 USC § 793, anyone who through gross negligence permits such information “to be removed from its proper place of custody” or allows it “to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed,” or fails to promptly report any such destruction to his superior officer“Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”Because of the typo-free and specific attack details in his lengthy texts, Hegseth appears to have cut and pasted the attack plan from a secure source into the insecure app, thereby endangering the lives of the servicemen involved.”
Under 18 U.S.C. § 2071, anyone who conceals, removes, or mutilates records “shall be fined, imprisoned not more than three years, or both and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.” The disqualification is mandatory, not discretionary.
Signal *automatically deletes conversations* after a certain number of days! So that means it will vanish, which is totally against protocols and the mandates listed above! That’s something else that really hasn’t come out yet. “Shall forfeit his office and be disqualified.” Hoooo boy! And another bonus! Trump officials appear to be using Signal in other governance contexts as well, creating records that are deliberately destroyed in violation of the Federal Records Act and/or the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). Y’all, this is amazing. And I had no idea when I was digging through the news that this would come out. What *they* did was ridiculous. But the rest of it? Yikes! (And we wondered why it was so important that tRump had all those documents at Mar-A-Slobo and wasn’t giving them up.)
I don’t know what’s going to happen with this. It’s getting bigger and bigger. It’s not fading from the news. And once the additional information I found *really* gets out, whoa. We’ll have to wait and see.
*****And now, please read a very special request from our awesome boss******
Zoomers, if you can find some spare change in the sofa cushions, we could use it. April starts soon, and that is month six of this depressed media climate we now live in due to Trump Depression Syndrome. We thank you for any help you can give, and most of all, we thank you for coming here to read. Ursula
“shall be fined, imprisoned not more than three years, or both and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
Pretty cut and dried BUT it needs someone to see the (alleged😉) crime and take action by bringing it to trial. Surely ’tis only proper that the rights of the accused be respected
The regime is counting on violating the law, with Congress and the courts being unwilling/unable to stop it. They’ve also calculated that most people won’t care unless they suffer direct consequences.
The existing protocol for holding a president accountable isn’t going to work, and a Constitutional amendment will eventually be needed to address this (if the Constitution survives, that is).