All the laws flouted during SignalGate

Imagine if Joe Biden or Hilary Clinton had shared top secret military operational details on a commercial message app

Lisa Needham

It’s the type of bombshell that would’ve sent heads rolling in any previous presidency.

On Monday, we learned that over a dozen high-level Trump officials had a breezy conversation over Signal about plans to bomb Yemen — and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz somehow accidentally included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, in the group chat. 

Then, the administration managed to basically goad Goldberg into releasing the entire text chain. This did not make things better, given how the texts undercut Trumpworld’s spin by showing that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth did in fact share details ahead of the attack that could’ve endangered US service members.

As the week draws to a close, the administration is still throwing excuses against the wall, hoping one of them might stick enough to distract people from the fact that “SignalGate” was highly illegal in multiple respects. Hegseth claims the texts weren’t really war plans. Waltz wants you to believe that somehow Goldberg’s number was “sucked in” to his contacts.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insists the texts merely show a sensitive policy discussion. And Trump is playing the hits by dismissing the debacle as yet another “witch hunt,” but it’s pretty clear he has no idea what’s really going on.

Even if you try to take all these incoherent explanations at face value, there are still a number of laws Trump officials likely flouted during the course of their unbelievably dunderheaded OPSEC disaster.

First, there’s the Espionage Act, which sounds like it applies only to spies or people who obtain information illegally. But there’s a provision in the law that applies to the SignalGate chatters, even if they were all legally entitled to the information. That’s because they have a custodial duty to keep national security information safe.

Ryan Goodman of Just Security, who also served as special counsel to the DOD under President Obama, explained there are criminal penalties for someone entrusted with defense security documents if they act with “gross negligence” in letting them out into the wild.

Presumably, the administration's stance is that no one in the chat knew that Goldberg was there, so they can’t be at fault. However, Signal makes it clear whenever someone new is added to a group, and the texts show that Goldberg was added to the ill-fated group by Waltz.

There are also multiple people in the chat who are identified only by initials, which was the case for Goldberg. But everyone in there had a duty to ensure they were sharing information only with people who had proper access. No one was doing that as a batch of initials-only folks hung out in the chat, and no one confirmed who was there.

The administration is trying to sidestep this by saying no classified information was shared. But all that claim shows is that they don’t know much about the Espionage Act, because criminal penalties still apply when “information respecting the national defense” is shared, regardless of whether it was classified. There’s just no way to spin that a detailed discussion of the times of military strikes on another country and the type of equipment to be used isn’t information related to national defense. Put another way, had this information fallen into less respectable hands than Goldberg’s, Yemen could have been warned of the upcoming attack and acted accordingly.

Indeed, the administration’s position that this information is totally legal and totally cool sets them up for a raft of Freedom of Information Act requests. If this information is no big deal, not remotely secret, not classified, then the administration would have to provide it in response to a request. But there’s obviously no way the administration would give this sort of information to any rando who requested it. There’s no way this administration would answer a reporter’s question about Yemen by casually providing strike plans before the strike happens. They know it’s sensitive and secret information and that they were supposed to protect it as such, but they’re lying to save their behinds.

Fun fact: Trump was charged with a violation of the Espionage Act in the classified documents case. He lucked out, of course, first by drawing the extremely pliable Aileen Cannon as the judge on the case and then by the Supreme Court inventing a new type of presidential immunity just for him. Other people, though, are not the president and would therefore not be immune.

Of course, Trump’s pardon power would come in handy here, as he can wipe away these sins with the stroke of a pen. Normal administrations wouldn’t pardon people who willfully disregard the safety of American soldiers, but this is not a normal administration.

There’s no reason for us to buy the explanation that this wasn’t classified material at the time it was being shared in the Signal chat. At one point Hegseth even identifies a time “WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP” on his Houthi targets.

As secretary of defense, Hegseth is ultimately able to determine whether information is classified. Outside of the confines of the administration, though, there doesn’t seem to be anyone who would disagree that this information clearly meets the bar.

Former senior military personnel told CNN that the information would be “absolutely classified” until after the strike because “the lives of our pilots depend on secrecy.” Even Fox News’s national security correspondent said it was classified. Or how about conservative tabloid stalwart New York Post. Over there, they’re pointing out that Executive Order 13256 says that information is “top secret” if unauthorized disclosure “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” There’s no way to say that revealing operational details of an upcoming strike on another country — which would always need to be secret! — is not damaging to national security.

The administration is hoping that a semantic argument will save the day. Goldberg referred to the texts as “war plans,” but that term usually refers to lengthy planning documents that can run thousands of pages. Hegseth’s sneering claim that Goldberg “has never seen a war plan” may be technically correct, but it’s a distinction without a difference. You can call it attack plans, you can call it a policy discussion, whatever. It’s still classified — or clearly would be under normal circumstances.

There’s also no question that anyone who isn’t under the protection of Donald Trump would suffer huge consequences for this. Or, as Military.com put it in their headline: “Different Spanks for Different Ranks': Hegseth's Signal Scandal Would Put Regular Troops in the Brig.” Every service member Military.com spoke with said that if they did what Hegseth had done, they’d “likely have their clearances revoked, lose their jobs, or end up with jail time.”

Conducting these conversations on Signal creates yet another legal problem, one that isn’t solved by any of the explanations the administration has tried on for size. Government records must be preserved, period. The use of Signal here likely violates the Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act. 

Any discussion on Signal, or personal email, or wherever else these yahoos blithely share bombing plans, is still an official government communication. When messages are sent outside official government accounts they need to be forwarded to an official government account.

But Signal has a feature where messages can be set to disappear after a fixed time, and the messages in Waltz’s group were set to disappear after one week before he changed it to four weeks.

Everyone in the Signal chat gets a notification about disappearing messages, meaning every government official in the chat should have been aware of this. So, even if this was a policy discussion or an informal chat that was definitely totally not about war plans, or contained no classified information, disappearing the messages is a no-go.

American Oversight has already filed a lawsuit over this, and if the administration is serious about saying that none of this correspondence was a big deal, they should be happy to provide anything and everything the group asks for. But we know that won’t happen, because magically the information will return to being secret. It’s secrecy for me but not for thee.

Sadly, it’s not clear that any member of the Trump administration will suffer any consequences. Instead, they’re trying to figure out how to blame Jeffrey Goldberg. But Goldberg’s not to blame. The administration owns this, whether they want to or not.

There’s no excuse the administration can come up with that will be believable, because the truth is obvious — they recklessly defied numerous laws by discussing war plans in a Signal group chat. And once they got caught, they made things even worse for themselves by incessantly lying about it, thereby ensuring this scandal won’t go away anytime soon.