I still maintain that Mike Waltz will bite the dust. The only reason he has not already done so is because Trump “didn’t want to give the satisfaction” to The Atlantic and other media outlets which had exposed SignalGate. That’s a stupid reason. Any real leader would have cleaned house, set an example, and gotten somebody competent in charge. But, as always, saving orange face is all that Trump can ever focus on. (Somebody might explain to him that it’s better to save your ass and not worry about your face.) But when Trump hears how the link happened, he may change his mind.
The disclosures nonetheless triggered a “forensic review” by the White House information technology office, which found that Waltz’s phone had saved Goldberg’s number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October.
According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate.
Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.
Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.
So there you have it. Evidently Waltz thought that he was adding Brian Hughes to the chat and since Hughes is a spokesperson for the National Security Council, that’s most likely proper protocol. But the carelessness is the issue here. Any secretary (and I’m not talking cabinet post secretary, I’m talking about clerical workers who have the job title “Secretary”) who made this error would have been fired on the spot. Rightfully so.
The carelessness here is that Goldberg’s information, as a reporter, should have been handled with kid gloves. If he was added to the phone at all, it should have been diligently and with double and maybe triple checking. At the altitude that Waltz flies, you can’t afford mistakes, let alone stupid clerical ones, like mistaking Goldberg, a journalist, for Hughes, a colleague.
I get it that Trump doesn’t want to fire Waltz and give the media a “win” but he might think about how it would make him look all macho and demanding. He loves that persona. Maybe that fantasy is what will take Waltz out, finally. If he’s asleep at the switch at this level, taking a basic precaution with his own phone, I don’t want to think what he might do or say in a high pressure situation.
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Zoomers, if you can spare a few greenbacks, it would help us on our journey through cyberspace, covering all these batshit stories. Thank you. Ursula
“Any real leader would have cleaned house, set an example, and gotten somebody competent in charge.”
Well, that’s the problem in a nutshell. Drumpf is anything but a “real leader.” Besides, he’s been doing very little other than “cleaning house” since January 20–except in Drumpf’s case, “cleaning house” means “getting rid of anyone that’s not 1000% loyal to me.” As for “competence,” that word means nothing to Drumpf–all he cares about is loyalty and subservience to his orange rotundness (if a person shows too much “competence,” he can’t possibly display the requisite amount of subservience because he’d be too smart).
Hegseth should also get the boot, as well as Moscow Tulsi.
Kara Swisher had a good alternative name for Signal-Gate when it was assumed Hegseth was coming off a bender when the jurno was added. “Whiskey-Leaks”