We have made two promises to you on this platform about what will happen in the Trump 2.0 administration: 1. spectacle and 2. it will always get worse. Right now we are going to talk about the “gets worse” portion of the current spectacle under investigation before the Senate Intelligence Committee pertaining to the war plans discussion on Signal which inadvertently included the editor of a prestigious magazine. Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s middle eastern envoy, was in Moscow for a meeting at the Kremlin when he was participating in this chat, according to CBS News.
And this is brand new information to John Ratcliffe, head of the CIA. Senator Michael Bennett (D-CO) got that admission from Ratcliffe. You might want to hit this link and scroll down to the video and see it. Hey, man, go easy on John. What is he, a babysitter? Oh, right, he’s the head of the Central Intelligence Agency and it’s his job to know the whereabouts of government personnel and what they’re discussing with whom — or in front of whom, or what can be overheard by whom, which is the operant question here.
What I think is that Jeffrey Goldberg needs to disclose what else he was privy to on that Signal chat so that somebody knows what got handed to Vladimir Putin on a silver platter. This is amateur hour here. Sweet Jesus, this is beyond belief.
President Trump’s Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he was included in a group chat with more than a dozen other top administration officials — and inadvertently, one journalist — on the messaging app Signal, a CBS News analysis of open-source flight information and Russian media reporting has revealed.
Russia has repeatedly tried to compromise Signal, a popular commercial messaging platform that many were shocked to learn senior Trump administration officials had used to discuss sensitive military planning.
Witkoff arrived in Moscow shortly after noon local time on March 13, according to data from the flight tracking website FlightRadar24, and Russian state media broadcast video of his motorcade leaving Vnukovo International Airport shortly after. About 12 hours later, he was added to the “Houthi PC small group” chat on Signal, along with other top Trump administration officials, to discuss an imminent military operation against the Houthis in Yemen, according to The Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who was included on the chat for reasons that remain unclear.
U.S. lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, have questioned the use of the commercial communications platform for the conversation, which Goldberg revealed Monday in his own report for The Atlantic. […]
Goldberg has not recounted Witkoff making any comments in the group chat until Saturday, after he left Russia and returned to the U.S., with a stop on Friday in Baku, Azerbaijan. It is unclear whether a phone issued to Witkoff by the U.S. government or a personal device was included in the Signal chat, or whether he had the device with him in Russia, but U.S. officials have been discouraged from using the messaging app on government devices, including by the Department of Defense.
Goldberg has stated that he is deliberately withholding all of the information that he overheard. So Witkoff may have discussed who knows what and we’re just not hearing about it and won’t until further details of all that was discussed on this chat are revealed — which may never happen, if they are classified. But the very presence of a phone where these things are discussed and stored in the device is what bears scrutiny here. And are you ready for things to get even worse?
During the group discussion on Signal, Goldberg reported, Ratcliffe named an active CIA intelligence officer in the chat at 5:24 p.m. eastern time, which was just after midnight in Russia. Witkoff’s flight did not leave Moscow until around 2 a.m. local time, and Sergei Markov, a former Putin advisor who is still close to the Russian president, said in a Telegram post that Witkoff and Putin were meeting in the Kremlin until 1:30 a.m.
In a worse case scenario, Putin himself could have been listening in on this chat. After all, Witkoff says Vlad’s “not a bad guy” so maybe the two old boys were sharing U.S. intelligence with one another. This is so far over the moon as to be simply unbelievable.
Heads have to roll for this. If Trump is going to maintain any kind of credibility, somebody’s heads have to roll. And that idiot SECDRUNK Pete Hegseth is the place to start. Yesterday it was thought that Mike Waltz would take the fall — and he may — but Gabbard and Ratcliffe are a pair of morons as well.
Even Steve Bannon has attacked John Ratcliffe. So if the monarchs of MAGA are turning on him, then you know it’s serious. Make no mistake, Bannon is in for the MAGA long game. He doesn’t know who will succeed Trump, nobody does, but Trumpism will not end with Trump, despite Chuck Schumer’s rosy fantasies along those lines.
**************
Zoomers, if you can find some spare change in your couch cushions, we could use it. Times are tougher than they were pre-November 5. It may be that people are just overwhelmed with all this. If that’s the case, we will simply bring our news and views to a smaller group of readers than before. We are in this for the long haul no matter what. Thank you. Ursula
From IN the Kremlin?
Whisky Tango Foxtrot.
Jesus Christ.
Treason by stupidity
Maybe Mr Goldberg should be brought before the Committee to testify on exactly what information he DIDN’T report but was privy to. There are some Committees which are allowed to hold hearings in secret.