'Signalgate' calls competence of national security officials into question

"Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man."

This was the president of the United States’ defense of his national security adviser, who’s embroiled in a humiliating, alarming and downright unfathomable breach of security — and confidence.

In case you missed it, "Signalgate" is the latest controversy involving senior Trump officials in which the competence of the people running our government is called into serious question.

It all started when a journalist was unwittingly added to a group chat by Waltz, apparently.

That would have been bad enough — apart from cc'ing our literal enemies, copying a member of the press on official government communication is highly inadvisable and could go all kinds of sideways.

But it gets way, way worse.

The group chat wasn’t about an upcoming party at the White House. It wasn’t about who’s winning in the office NCAA bracket. And it wasn’t a bunch of guys sharing "White Lotus" memes.

It was our top officials — including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and others — sharing the plans for an attack on Yemen.

On a group chat.

On a commercial encryption app.

That the Atlantic magazine's Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to the Signal chat by Waltz isn’t the worst part — it’s only the most embarrassing part, and it’s how we know about this truly unbelievable and irresponsible FUBAR situation, to use military slang.

The reasons this is so bad should be obvious, even to a child. Our top leaders should not be discussing what is clearly sensitive, likely classified information, on unsanctioned platforms, like Signal. There are mechanisms in place — SCIFs or sensitive compartmented information facilities and secure landlines for that. Signal is an effective encrypted messaging app for certain things, but it is not infallible or unhackable.

Spin starts spinning

Despite this shocking discovery, the Never Apologize crew over at the White House is digging in its heels.

Hegseth has called the whole story "a hoax," despite Donald Trump himself admitting it was real and a mistake. He and Waltz have also smeared Goldberg, a well-respected journalist who handled the situation he found himself in with the utmost responsibility and, in fact, patriotism.

"You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes. This is a guy who peddles in garbage," said Hegseth. Waltz called Goldberg a "loser."

Nice, right? These are professionals, folks.

They’re also insisting what was discussed wasn’t classified and didn’t amount to "war plans."

"Nobody was texting war plans," said Hegseth repeatedly.

And in a Senate intelligence hearing Tuesday, top officials including Gabbard and Ratcliffe insisted — under oath — no classified information was in the chat.

Over at Fox the spin is spinning.

Jesse Watters laughed it off as a "wee bit of a security breach," and said, "We’ve all texted the wrong person before." Sean Hannity blamed "media hysteria." Lawrence Jones insisted of government officials and Signal, "They all use it — they’re not supposed to, but they use it," even as his co-host Steve Doocy reminded, "But not top secret stuff."

Don’t look to Republicans in Congress for much outrage either.

"This is what the leftist media is reduced to," said Sen. Josh Hawley on Fox. "[G]riping about who’s on a text message and who’s not."

That’s right — the party of "Lock Her Up!" chants over Hillary Clinton’s e-mails thinks this security breach is a media obsession and no big deal.

With all the denials, Goldberg released part of the text chain to prove what was in it was, in fact, war plans, including weather conditions, timing, targets, weapons and sequence of strikes. It even included cartoonish language like this, from Hegseth: "(THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP) ..."

All of this is obviously alarming, but I go back to the president’s defense of Waltz: He "learned a lesson."

This might be comforting if Waltz were a low-level clerk who’d made a records mistake at the National Agriculture Library.

But Waltz and his chat buddies are in charge of our nation’s security at the highest levels. Is this really a situation for on-the-job training? Is the president’s national security adviser an intern? Is the secretary of Defense an apprentice? Are we really just learning as we go as we drop literal bombs?

That Trump shrugged this off as merely a teachable moment says so much about how little he values expertise and how much he values looking good on television. And it’s why this administration has been marked by so much incompetence.

Is it too much to ask that the people in charge of our national security actually know how to protect it?

S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.

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