The scandal in which the highest-ranking Trump defense and intelligence officials planned a war on their cell phones and, inexplicably, dragged in a journalist as they did so continued to be the hottest topic of conversation yesterday. The two most notable threads of it all involve (a) the people involved in it claiming that nothing classified was discussed on the chat; and (b) people on the right trying to personally discredit the journalist who was included, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, for some reason.

The claims that the chat did not contain classified material are ridiculous on their face. They literally planned an act of war, discussed its strategy and the president's thinking, and then went into detailed specifics regarding targets and stuff while also identifying covert CIA operatives by name. I understand that lie, lie, lie, lie has generally been a winning strategy for Republicans for the past ten years but anyone who believes this particular lie is either a blithering idiot or they're just saying they believe it in order to help circle the political wagons.

The attempts to discredit Goldberg, while predictable, are bizarre. Partially because, as noted yesterday, everyone involved already admitted that what he wrote was true. But also because the more disgraceful Republicans make Goldberg out to be " or the more they claim they have no idea who he is " the worse it looks for the people involved in the chat in the first place. I mean:

Mike Waltz lies that he's "never met, don't know, never communicated with" Jeffrey Goldberg

PYONGYANG: Stung by his omission from the Trump administration's recent war-planning chat, on Wednesday Kim Jong Un demanded to be included in all such group chats in the future.

"Why was this Goldberg person, who doesn't even have nuclear weapons, included?" the North Korean dictator asked. "This should never be allowed to happen in this country."

Kim said that he had downloaded the latest version of the Signal app and was waiting for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to ping him.

Calling his exclusion from the Houthi bombing chat "hurtful," he said, "I shouldn't have to read about it in The Atlantic."

(The Borowitz Report)

When you've lost the National Review 2

I Don't Care If It Wasn't Classified

After yesterday's bombshell story of Jeffrey Goldberg being accidentally added to a group chat on military strikes on the Houthi pirates, one of today's big follow-on fights is the question of what information was shared in the Signal chat and whether it was classified. There's a direct dispute between Goldberg, who wrote that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's texts "contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing," and Hegseth, who denies this. (Goldberg insists that he has not published these messages out of concern for national security, although nothing would stop him from sharing them with the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session; the committee would doubtless very much like to see them).

There was a lot of jousting today in an Intelligence Committee hearing, where CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (both participants in the chat) told the Senate panel that the chat didn't share classified information. To which my response is: who cares? The classification system is useful in flagging for the casual reader what information shouldn't be shared (and it is also famously promiscuous in its use), but what matters is what information is actually something that should be secret for national security reasons. That's the legal standard under the Espionage Act, and it's the practical standard as well. That was the issue during the Hillary emails debate: a hyper focus on what was and wasn't classified missed the fact that we shouldn't be giving foreign adversaries an opening to spy in real time on the thinking and scheduling of our nation's chief diplomat. That's an intelligence goldmine even if it includes no formally classified information, let alone classified documents. So it is here. The story is, of course, much worse if Goldberg is telling the truth (either he or Hegseth is lying; there's no middle ground). But even if that part of the story isn't true, there is hardly a more sensitive fact that we need to keep secret than that senior American policymakers are discussing a surprise military strike. You carefully guard that discussion, whether or not it includes coordinates, targets, methods, or strike times.