No, I have not been ‘disappeared’ – yet! I was AWOL because I was out of town while looking for a new apartment in a different city where I will be relocating in a few weeks. It was unfortunate I was not at my keyboard when ‘SignalGate’ exploded on the scene. The absolute buffoonery that was involved in this incident was staggering. However, the hypocrisy of the Republican party’s response to this given their overblown outrage about Hillary Clinton’s email server is equally staggering.
I worked in the defense industry for many years, held high level clearances and know a lot about the proper procedures for handling and discussing classified information. Had any of my colleagues and I done anything like this, we would have been, at a minimum, fired in a heartbeat and could very well have been prosecuted. Yet, all of the Trump Cabinet clowns involved in this are still at their jobs and Trump and his Republican sycophants are defending them and playing down the seriousness of this huge breach of national security.
This whole incident violates laws on so many levels. First, the Signal app, is not approved for sensitive government communications. Every single person on that call had to be aware of that and yet they proceeded anyway. Secondly, the text messages were set to ‘auto delete’ after 30 days. That is illegal. Government records are supposed to be preserved by law. So, even before the conversation got started, the whole thing was illegal from the outset. And these are not some low-level government employees (remember the National Guardsman, Jack Teixeira, who posted classified information on the web and is now serving a 15-year prison sentence!), they are the top people in the United States national security community.
It got even worse once they all started texting classified information and regardless of the spin, they want to put on it, information concerning American strikes before they happen is, almost by definition, classified. The egregious and knowing compromise of our national security information by these people is beyond mindboggling. It is even more mindboggling that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the relevant commander (CentCom in this case) were not on the chat since they are the ones who will be responsible for carrying out this attack. No doubt, these Cabinet clowns knew that the Joint Chief and the CentCom commander would immediately stop this chat on an unsecured channel so to solve that problem, they just kept them out of the loop. That, in itself, should show the blatant disregard for the law and for national security.
This whole incident is disturbing on so many levels, but it really begs the question, how many other illegal, behind the scenes, chats are taking place on unsecured channels with people, more than likely, using their personal phones? Everyone should understand, our adversaries are having a field day collecting intelligence on America from the very people who are supposed to be protecting us. Even worse, all our allies (if we have any left) will seriously hesitate to share intelligence with the United States given the cavalier and careless nature the Trump administration is handling such information. All this makes the United States much more vulnerable and could very well lead to the loss of American lives at home and abroad.
People should be fired over this incident and investigations launched into all the laws that were broken. That is what should happen. In all likelihood, even if there are investigations, they will likely result in nothing more than wrist slapping, if even that. And the clown car will continue to roll along as we all wait for the next major screwup.
Given Trump’s trade wars and this latest breach of national security, the rest of the world is learning a very valuable lesson that will adversely affect this country for decades. American can no longer be trusted. All our allies are rethinking their relationships with the United States and every single one of them are developing plans to wean themselves away from America. Trump has always said his vision is for ‘America First.’ Soon, it will be ‘America Alone’ and it is a dangerous world to live in without allies and friends.
