The Many Overlapping Scandals of the Pete Hegseth Group Chat

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/group-chat-security-signal-president.html

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Obviously, the big story this week is the revelation that top officials in the Trump administration — among them Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Miller, a deputy chief of staff in the White House, and Mike Waltz, the national security adviser — had discussed state secrets and coordinated military action in a Signal group chat.

The reason we know about this is that Waltz accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to the chat. Goldberg left the chat after events — an airstrike on the Houthi group in Yemen on March 15 — confirmed its authenticity. He later published a story on the security breach.

When, after the story dropped, the administration publicly challenged Goldberg’s reporting, with Hegseth denying that he was “texting war plans” and the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accusing him of fabricating a hoax, The Atlantic published nearly the full chat logs, confirming Goldberg’s version of events.

So far, the press has been treating this, rightfully, as an enormous scandal — an unprecedented security breach that raises questions about the overall integrity of communications and record keeping in the administration. If these were junior officials, they would almost certainly face prosecution and potential prison time. If this were any other administration, there is little doubt that multiple people involved would have already resigned.

What I want to say, here, is that in addition to the main scandal, there are several other, overlapping scandals that may be even more serious than the one we’ve been focused on so far.

At the top is the strong likelihood that the use of Signal — an app that can be set to delete messages after a certain amount of time, determined by the user — was meant to circumvent both the Presidential Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act and to allow officials to plan (or scheme) outside normal channels. It is not for nothing that the specific name of the chat in question, “Houthi PC Small Group,” suggests that this use of the app is a frequent occurrence.