Take this Waltz, please

Garrett Graff makes a couple of good points about the latest adventures from the information security adminostration:

3) The White House just doesn’t believe the rules apply to it (Part 1). 18 U.S.C. § 793(f) makes it a federal crime for people entrusted with information related to the national defense to, “through gross negligence permit [classified intelligence] to be … delivered to anyone in violation of [that] trust.”

If the test for a criminal investigation is “gross negligence,” I guess it would be slightly more grossly negligent to add Dmitry Peskov or Vladimir Putin himself to a principals’ committee Signal chat about classified war plans, but only barely. In fact, there are two separate but important parts of this mishandling that would be worthy of follow-up investigation: Waltz’s original action adding Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat, but then, after Goldberg left the chat, no one bothered to see who “JG” was in the chat group in the first place. It doesn’t appear that the Trump administration even realized Goldberg had been in the chat until he went to the National Security Council for comment. Did anyone realize that Goldberg was in the chat? If so, that’s a separate violation of 18 U.S.C. § 793(f), which requires anyone “having knowledge that [classified intelligence] has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust … fails to make prompt report of such loss.” If no one is monitoring who is leaving these group chats nor paying attention to who is added and who is in one conversation vs. another, that’s a recipe for even more counterintelligence failures going forward.

4)The White House just doesn’t believe the rules apply to it (Part 2). All sorts of corners of the US government use encrypted Signal chats in ways both it should and shouldn’t. But the fact that Mike Waltz “set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four” should raise all sorts of alarms for us as citizens and particularly for us journalists and historians. This is clearly not a Signal thread that anyone had any intention of preserving — as they are legally required to do! — under federal records law. So: How many other Signal group chats are underway right now where people in the Trump White House are ignoring federal law? What decisions are being made right now with no records or future accountability? To be clear, this is itself a violation of federal law — and not only did no one on the group chat object (“Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be having policy discussions on a group chat!”) but they all participated casually and deeply enough to make clear that this is routine SOP in the Trump administration today.

To sum it up in one sentence, the position of the Trump administration on internal communications is that the intelligence services of foreign nations should have contemporaneous access to all of them but the American public and future historians should not (except by accident.)