Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic tells how a Trump official mistakenly put him on a Signal chat about top secret plans to bomb Houthi targets across Yemen. The chat took place on Signal, a commercial app. The case reveals astonishing incompetence and recklessness at the highest levels.
Several Defense Department officials expressed shock that Mr. Hegseth had put American war plans into a commercial chat group. They said that having this type of conversation in a Signal chat group itself could be a violation of the Espionage Act, a law covering the handling of sensitive information.
Revealing operational war plans before planned strikes could also put American troops directly into harm’s way, the officials said. And former F.B.I. officials who worked on leak cases described this as a devastating breach of national security. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive national security matter.
Former national security officials said that if personal cellphones were used in the group chat, the behavior would be even more egregious because of ongoing Chinese hacking efforts.
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said that the “story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen.”
The Trump administration’s rapid slashing of the government workforce creates fertile ground for foreign adversaries to recruit disgruntled staffers who know some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, according to former intelligence officials and national security insiders.
Hundreds of intelligence and national security officials who had access to reams of classified information are among the tens of thousands of federal workers who lost their jobs since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
POLITICO spoke to more than half a dozen people connected to the U.S. intelligence community — former intelligence officials, lawyers who work on national security and experts on insider threats — for this story. All expressed deep concern that the administration’s rapid cuts to the national security workforce will create recruiting openings for other countries.
“What we have done is we have created a ripe set of targets for our adversaries,” said James Lawler, a former CIA operations officer who specialized in recruiting foreign spies for the U.S.
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Lawler, the former CIA officer who recruited foreign spies, said the administration is creating exactly the kind of vulnerabilities that they sought to exploit.
“I never recruited happy people,” said Lawler, who led the team that dismantled a nuclear smuggling network spearheaded by the Pakistani nuclear physicist A. Q. Khan. “People who were pissed off, people who had axes to grind made it very easy for me to convince them to basically commit espionage.”
