{"id":108781,"date":"2025-03-29T11:17:47","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T16:17:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=108781"},"modified":"2025-03-29T11:17:47","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T16:17:47","slug":"108781","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=108781","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Media Efforts To Turn Signalgate Into A Scandal Are The Surest Sign It\u2019s Not One<\/a><\/p>\n

There are still pieces of the \u201cSignalgate\u201d saga<\/a>\u00a0of interest \u2014 like how did the worst person in Washington end up in the chat? But what would have been a relatively minor controversy has been so excessively hyped up as an epic scandal that it\u2019s impossible to remember why it aroused anyone in the first place.<\/p>\n

What we know from\u00a0screenshots<\/a>\u00a0of a Signal smartphone group chat published in The Atlantic on Monday (followed by another round of screenshots on Wednesday) is that a couple of weeks ago, high-level Trump administration officials were in the chat debating the merits of a U.S. attack on the Islamic Houthi militants in Yemen. The Atlantic\u2019s Jeffrey Goldberg, who is\u00a0proven to make things up<\/a> for the sake of defaming President Trump, said he was included in the chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who has confirmed as much, though he said it was accidental and he doesn\u2019t know how Goldberg was added.<\/p>\n

There are legitimate concerns about federal recordkeeping and handling of sensitive communications, but to the extent that the content of the chat is newsworthy, it features an interesting debate on foreign policy between Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others. What\u2019s most consequential is a portion in which Hegseth tells the chat the times that some targets will be bombed on a specific day, without specific locations, names, or routes.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s debatable whether the information was classified (the administration says it wasn\u2019t) or could have potentially endangered lives \u2014 what good is a time without a location? \u2014 but per usual, the media haven\u2019t let enough be enough. Before publishing the full screenshots, Goldberg claimed that in the chat Waltz had identified a covert CIA agent, which\u00a0wasn\u2019t true<\/a>; and he suggested that explicitly named in the chat were specific enemy targets, which was\u00a0also untrue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then a Wall Street Journal editorial\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0the \u201creal security scandal\u201d was that Trump\u2019s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who is at the center of peace negotiations in Israel and Ukraine, was on the chat while in Russia and therefore, \u201cRussian intelligence services must be listening to Mr. Witkoff\u2019s every eyebrow flutter.\u201d There\u2019s no evidence that Witkoff\u2019s phone was on him while he was in Russia, and the one message from him in the screenshots would have placed him back in the U.S. at the time it was sent. Witkoff has\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0he only had a secure device while he was in Russia.<\/p>\n

Most irksome are subsequent news articles characterizing the chat screenshots as containing \u201cdetails\u201d and \u201cspecifics\u201d on the military attacks, when it\u2019s at best unclear how useful time stamps alone would be in thwarting them. It\u2019s a pointless mind exercise anyway. The public knew nothing about the conversation or the military attack plans until days after they were executed. If that\u2019s to Goldberg\u2019s credit, then congratulations to him \u2014 he\u2019s not a complete and total traitor to his country, even if he is anti-American in every other way.<\/p>\n

That brings us to the enduring point of concern with this highly oversold story: Why did Mike Waltz have Goldberg\u2019s contact information? What are the odds that this exact anti-Trump media figure would be selected to slip into a sensitive group chat? Waltz\u00a0has offered<\/a>\u00a0doubtful explanations and theories, such as the possibility that Goldberg\u2019s number was listed under the wrong name in his phone contacts or, even more dubious, that Goldberg\u2019s contact was\u00a0\u201csucked in\u201d<\/a>\u00a0via a third party. Waltz has also said he thought Goldberg was \u201csomeone else<\/a>.\u201d Okay, who? Either Waltz never intended to include the contact belonging to Goldberg \u2014\u00a0\u201csucked in\u201d \u2014 or he did but thought it was a different person. It can\u2019t be both.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible Waltz really has no clue what took place there. Stranger things have happened. But his version of events isn\u2019t satisfying. It\u2019s to his benefit that it\u2019s the one part of this whole episode receiving the least amount of attention from the people keeping the story alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Media Efforts To Turn Signalgate Into A Scandal Are The Surest Sign It\u2019s Not One There are still pieces of the \u201cSignalgate\u201d saga\u00a0of interest \u2014 like how did the worst person in Washington end up in the chat? But what would have been a relatively minor controversy has been so excessively hyped up as an … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=108781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108782,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108781\/revisions\/108782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=108781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=108781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=108781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}