I don’t see how National Security Advisor Mike Waltz organizing a group chat with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg goes away without Waltz’s resignation. There may be some ambiguity about whether Signal, the app used for the chat, is authorized for government communication and in what contexts; Senator Tom Cotton said recently there is an “understanding” that the Biden administration had authorized its use. Presumably there will soon be a more informed consensus about how reckless using Signal was from a pure national-security perspective.  

But the inclusion of Goldberg in the chat puzzles, and may turn out to be the main issue in the entire affair. Goldberg is one of the most prominent and influential ideological foes of the Trump administration, especially on foreign policy. He is committed to exactly the opposite of what President Donald Trump is trying to achieve. He has been consistent over a long career. He played an important role in starting the Iraq War, spreading falsehoods about Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda; he has spread derogatory information about Trump, and he has made the Atlantic more or less the epicenter of the elite effort to portray the Trump’s administration’s foreign policy as a moral abomination because of the president’s efforts to end the Ukraine war. So the obvious question is: Why did the president’s national security advisor include him in a group chat about military action in the Middle East?

Apparently by accident is the claim. Goldberg has written he was surprised to see a message from Mike Waltz inviting him to the chat. Goldberg’s associate Hanna Rosin writes in the Atlantic that, you know how it is, sometimes your mother gets accidentally included in a text chain with your sisters, and that can be embarrassing. Well, fine. But Goldberg, by this explanation, is not a random figure in Michael Waltz’s digital world, but someone who comes up quickly in the prompts—from the list of people previously communicated with. 

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It would be interesting to know how often Michael Waltz has used Signal with Goldberg, assuming this wasn’t the first time—a top Trump official communicating with a sworn enemy of the Trump administration. Reportedly there are some in MAGA world who were worried previously that Waltz was playing for the other team—he has hired many people from neoconservative think tanks to his staff. Waltz has gone out of his way to proclaim public loyalty to Trump and his foreign policy. But the whole episode leaves one with a feeling redolent of Trump’s first term, when Trump hired people like John Bolton, whose private agenda was to undermine Trump’s efforts to redirect American foreign policy away from the neo-liberal, neoconservative, “forever war” consensus. 

I hope there is an FBI investigation. We need to know how reckless the use of Signal was in this context, how easy or not easy it was for foreign intelligence to access the ruminations of Trump’s national security decision-making. And we need to know how often Waltz used Signal to communicate, and leak, to Goldberg. 

There is a broader context here: Trump (through Elon Musk) is firing tens of thousands of government workers, most of whom have done nothing wrong. Already there are reports of extreme disarray in agencies, like Social Security, that Trump did not and would not disparage during his campaign. It seems to me it would be politically difficult for Trump to fire blameless government employees and yet keep someone who is leaking information to a powerful ideological enemy of his administration.