Using the platform was dangerous and wrong \u2013 but officials appeared to prioritize shielding themselves from litigation<\/p>\n
No senior US government official in the now-infamous \u201cHouthi PC Small Group\u201d Signal chat seemed new to that kind of group, nor surprised by the sensitivity of the subject discussed in that insecure forum, not even when the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth<\/a>, chimed in with details of a coming airstrike. No one objected \u2013 not the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who was abroad and using her personal cellphone to discuss pending military operations; not even the presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, who was in Moscow<\/em> at the time. Yet most of these officials enjoy the luxury of access to secure government communications systems 24\/7\/365.<\/p>\n Reasonable conclusions may be drawn from these facts. First, Trump\u2019s national security cabinet commonly discusses secret information<\/a> on insecure personal devices. Second, sophisticated adversaries such as Russia and China intercept such communications, especially those sent or received in their countries. Third, as a result, hostile intelligence services now probably possess blackmail material regarding these officials\u2019 indiscreet past conversations on similar topics. Fourth, as a first-term Trump administration<\/a> official and ex-CIA officer, I believe the reason these officials risk interacting in this way is to prevent their communications from being preserved as required by the Presidential Records Act, and avoid them being discoverable in litigation, or subject to a subpoena or Freedom of Information Act request. And fifth, no one seems to have feared being investigated by the justice department for what appears to be a violation of the Espionage Act\u2019s Section 793(f), which makes gross negligence in mishandling classified information a felony; the FBI director, Kash Patel, and attorney general, Pam Bondi, quickly confirmed that hunch. Remarkably, the CIA director John Ratcliffe wouldn\u2019t even admit to Congress that he and his colleagues had made a mistake.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Using the platform was dangerous and wrong \u2013 but officials appeared to prioritize shielding themselves from litigation No senior US government official in the now-infamous \u201cHouthi PC Small Group\u201d Signal chat seemed new to that kind of group, nor surprised by the sensitivity of the subject discussed in that insecure forum, not even when the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}