The Everything Scandal

This week's signal disclosures should infect every corner of the Trump administration, but Democrats will have to press the case relentlessly

(Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

Democrats have shown real signs of life since The Atlantic exposed the amateurish inner-workings of the Trump administration. But in the interests of keeping them bucked up so they don’t return to hibernation (and, frankly, in the interest of fueling distrust between the country’s political leadership and the uniformed military) I'd like to turn the clock back to September 11, 2012.

That’s when four Americans were killed at a U.S. facility in Libya, just two months before the U.S. election. As you’d expect, Republicans pounced. They pounced a bit too fast and carelessly, in fact, which is how their presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, ended up walking into this trap and losing the upper hand on the issue before voters cast their ballots.

Republicans didn’t let up, though, even in defeat. They presumed, correctly, that their next opponent would be Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time of the attack in Benghazi. And so they kept at it. They fanned conspiracy theories and leaked sensitive information selectively, to create an aura of scandal around her. They turned the attack into a hashtag meme. They did everything but use the blood of the dead as war paint.

And here, too, they were unable to make the issue stick, because the facts were on Clinton’s side, and she was smarter than they were. She testified before Congress for 11 hours and by the time it was over, the consensus left to right was that Republicans had faceplanted and would move on.

Which they did: To her emails.

Republican relentlessness in scandalmongering made Donald Trump president, and might ultimately end American democracy. How did Republicans discover that Clinton frequently used a personal email address to conduct official business? From one of their many Benghazi investigations, naturally. They couldn’t have known what their efforts would yield. They just kept pressing and pressing until something stuck.

Now fast forward to 2019. Trump is president and Democrats have a large House majority. Nancy Pelosi is speaker again, and many of her members are frustrated and impatient over her reluctance to subject Trump to similarly intrusive oversight.

In September of that year a whistleblower alerted Congress that Trump had blackmailed the president of Ukraine to fabricate dirt on Joe Biden (the likely Democratic presidential nominee) and it forced her hand. She had no choice but to begin an impeachment inquiry.

But it wouldn’t be a fishing expedition. It wouldn’t be an open-ended inquiry at all. It was to be a goldilocks exercise, meant to hold the brittle Democratic caucus together, and nothing more. Not too hot (can’t make the frontline members feel anxious), but not too cold (it is an impeachment inquiry after all). And so, when we learned in the course of their inquiry that Trump had a whole cache of call transcripts stashed inappropriately on a classified server, the Democratic investigators…did nothing. They ignored the lead; they bypassed an opportunity to blow the scandal open wider. They justified this decision by claiming it would overcomplicate the simple crime they could already prove. In reality, Pelosi wanted it all behind her; to get back to the undefeated politics of holding test votes on health-care bills.

That impeachment was nevertheless important. We learned a lot. Without it, Trump might have ratfucked his way to re-election by springing a surprise pseudoscandal on his opponent. But it wasn’t all it could or should have been. And it presaged the 2021 impeachment, after the January 6 insurrection: another reluctant and prematurely aborted accountability effort that historians will puzzle over for all time.

This week’s Signal disclosures confront Democrats with the same dilemma they’ve faced repeatedly in the Trump era: Treat it like Benghazi? Or treat it like the Ukraine shakedown? There are big differences between this scandal and those, of course, the most important of which is that Democrats don’t currently control any congressional committees. But the answer should be obvious: they should behave as though they will chase Trump and his minions to the end of the Earth to get the full story.

GOLDBERG IN THEM THAR SHILLS

By now we know the basic shape of Signalghazi:

• It starts when national security adviser Michael Waltz mistakenly invites the wrong contact, reporter Jeffrey Goldberg, into a group chat;

• The group chat happens to contain all of Donald Trump’s national security principals, plus a few other sundry randos;

• Oh, and they’re all in there (with the exception of Goldberg) to plan and weigh the pros and cons of a military strike in Yemen—something that is definitely not supposed to happen on a commercial communications app, even an end-to-end encrypted one like Signal;

• Some of the principals express their views on the merits of the proposed strike—a revelatory debate that will fall out of the conversation once the scandal erupts.

• That part of the conversation proceeds from the premise that President Trump doesn’t understand the strategic purpose of the strike and may not actually have given the order. “As I heard it, the president was clear: green light,” wrote Stephen Miller, not exactly clearing up the confusion;

• Nevertheless, the principals agree that the strike should proceed on schedule;

• This culminates in Defense Secretary nee Fox News Weekend Host Pete Hegseth texting the group detailed strike plans—“THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP”—which turn out to be accurate;

• Goldberg leaves the chat, completes his due diligence, and writes a careful-but-damning article about it;

• The administration smears Goldberg—up to the point of suggesting he might have hacked their conversation to conduct espionage—but gets caught when he publishes the full signal thread in a followup article.

• As things spiral, it turns out Waltz et al appear to have endangered an Israeli spy in their carelessness.

Now let’s pull back from the particulars and home in instead on all the rotten things they reveal about this administration.

• Incompetence: Duh. Lack of attention to detail; unprofessionalism;

• Malice: The smearing of Jeffrey Goldberg, the indifference to the lives of innocents, the rules being for other people; the implied administration modus operandi of using disappearing encrypted messages to hide malfeasance;

• Bad faith: This is where the text of the Signal conversation becomes important.

It’s easy to imagine a wide range of opinions—from hawk to dove, realist to idealist—about the purpose and wisdom of a military strike. Maybe it’s a bad idea because it won’t work; maybe it’s a bad idea because the goals it will successfully advance are outweighed by the risks. Maybe the consequences are unclear, and that makes it bad, because it’d be immoral and geopolitically costly to cause a catastrophic loss of life while flying half blind.

None of that kind of thinking is in evidence. All of the equities under consideration pertain to appearance and perception. The attack was conceived as a demonstration of power to produce propaganda. To “send a message” and gain leverage over other leaders for the purposes of extortion—the most faithless possible reason to send pilots into harms way and kill bystanders.

The Trump regime is an endless recursion of propaganda generation to build more power to generate more propaganda to build more power… because as long as that perpetual motion machine is operating they can plunder undetected. Appearance is the whole ballgame for them: What they can create the illusion of vs. what others can prove. Like when Bill Barr published a false summary of the Mueller report, or when Trump confiscated notes on his meeting with Vladmir Putin from a U.S. government interpreter. Like when Trump didn’t prepare the country for a pandemic because he was worried about the stock market.

This is why it’d be a mistake to let the Signal story die on the vine of its particulars. If they hadn’t been caught, they’d be using the illusion of some major military success to shake down Europe. Now that they’re busted, Trump will seek to lock down Republicans in Congress over time; if he succeeds, there will be no thorough congressional investigation; Democratic inquiries as to specific details will go unanswered; on Pam Bondi’s orders, if not Trump’s, the FBI will do nothing; it’s quite possible officials will engage in sanctionable conduct now that a judge has ordered the administration to preserve undeleted records.

It’s an ur-Trump scandal. A revelation, like the hidden call transcripts in term one, that points to wider wrongdoing and a reason to question just about everything the administration does.

BOASBERG, RIGHT AHEAD

On Wednesday a reporter asked Donald Trump if he’d been briefed on an incident in Lithuania, where four U.S. service members had gone missing on a maintenance mission. “No, I haven’t,” he said. Really? Again? Those soldiers are now presumed dead.

We’ve seen plain-clothes, mask-wearing ICE agents abduct a Tufts University student off the streets of Somerville, MA. We’ve seen the Homeland Security secretary travel to El Salvador to pose for glam shots against the backdrop of a gulag, where we know she sent at least some innocent men to rot indefinitely. Their crime? Being brown-skinned and having tattoos…. Or maybe not even that.

How did that oversight happen? Or was it malice? Is the Trump administration intentionally torturing and imprisoning innocent immigrants, to “send a message” once again? If so, is Trump aware?

The Trump administration is playing contempt-of-court chicken with district court Judge James Boasberg, to thwart his inquiry into whether officials intentionally violated his orders. Are they sweating because the evidence is also on Signal? Have they deleted it?

This is to say nothing about how Elon Musk and DOGE teams have recorded their raids on various agencies and departments, their illegal impoundments and firings, which have lead to a projected half-trillion revenue shortfall.

It’s all horrible, but the Signal scandal casts it in an even more unflattering light.

• How in-the-loop is the actual president?

• Were any roundups and kidnappings planned on Signal? What about deliberations over how to respond to court orders?

• How many officials have transmitted classified, or sensitive national-security information over Signal or similar apps?

• Have those messages all disappeared?

• Are any major Trump administration initiatives undertaken in good faith, or are they all just for propaganda generation purposes?

A growing number of centrist thinkers and activists, watching normal Democratic base voters revolt in disgust over their party’s weakness, have come around recently to the idea of “fighting moderates”: Candidates and members whose policy views are middle of the road, but who don’t take shit from their opponents and don’t run from fights. Policy moderation probably selects for timidity, but I suspect that with enough diligence, and a different set of consultants, they could find people who fit the fighting-moderate bill. And it would be an immense improvement over the status quo.

But that won’t do anything about the party as it is right now. It is conceivable, though unlikely, that Democrats will claim control of the House well before the midterm elections. What would they do if that happened? How would Hakeem Jeffries use his power? How would his chairmen wield their gavels?

Today’s frontline House and Senate Democrats do not inspire confidence on this score. It’s not clear whether they have the mettle to pursue the Signal scandal wherever it leads, rather than call for Waltz and Hegseth to resign, then move on once the news cycle turns. Would these members follow every lead if it might put them on the side of due process for Venezuelans? Or the foreign students Trump kidnapped for supporting Palestinian liberation?

As is so often the case, my guess is no, but my hope is yes.