New Delhi: Believe it or not, US National Security Adviser Mike Waltz created a chat group on open-source encrypted messaging service Signal with top Trump officials, including Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice-President J.D. Vance to discuss the Yemen bombing and added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic on it.
Goldberg published a piece detailing how he was added to the 18-person chat on Signal, which also included Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, earlier this month by an account sharing the name of Waltz.
Later, Goldberg said an account named “Pete Hegseth” laid out a plan for strikes in Yemen, including precise information about “weapons packages, targets, and timing” of the attack, shortly before it took place.
Goldberg said he initially felt someone was masquerading as the officials to trick him and he exited the group once he realised it was genuine. He realised this after the bombing happened in Yemen against Houthis earlier this month as stated in the group by the Defence Secretary.
He shared screenshots of the chat but redacted sensitive information which would compromise US officials and others working in the field.
Goldberg also wrote that he sent out a series of questions to multiple people in the Group asking for their reaction and the veracity of the chat group itself.
Brian Hughes, the spokesman for the National Security Council, responded “confirming the veracity of the Signal group”.
“This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” Hughes wrote, according to the article in The Atlantic.
“The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security,” it said.
William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice-president is fully aligned with the president.
The chat message showed Vance had an alternative viewpoint on the bombing.
“The Vice-President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice-President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice-President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”
Goldberg said that Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by his colleagues.
The Signal app, which is prone to hacking by foreign operators, is not approved by the government for sharing classified information.
“The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said,” the report stated.
Incidentally, Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved, Goldberg wrote.
Incidentally, Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president earlier), had repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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