The Clown Show

Typical DUI hires 

They are too stupid. But Putin  and Xi Jinping aren't.  That's going to be a problem     . 

"We don't even know who the houthis are..."

What a cluster fuck on so many levels.   Putting aside for the moment sharing both (1) combat operational details and (2) high level foreign policy discussions, another big issue is the fact that Signal deletes messages after a period of time.  These folks are conducting official business and a record needs to be kept (even Nixon knew this) for purposes of federal record retention and freedom of information policies.   

Heads need to roll and it would be good if the president did what he does best (entertainment) and brings back the boardroom scene from the Apprentice, where he can fire one these clowns on prime time TV.    

> These folks are conducting official business and a record needs to be kept (even Nixon knew this) for purposes of federal record retention and freedom of information policies.

I assume there's a statutory basis for the things you describe, Ken, but this is Trump we're talking about. It's pretty well established that rules don't matter to him, and that he rages when people take notes in meetings. He's a useful idiot, but he's not a complete imbecile.

> Typical DUI hires

That's some good old-fashioned gold, fishcane, which is my way of saying I wish I had thought of it.

David Gans posted this, linking someone else as author:

As someone who uses Signal every day, I need to explain how totally committed to being an absolute dumbass multiple people had to be in order for this security leak to happen.

Okay, so in Signal if you want to talk to multiple people you have to create a group and give it a name, for example "JD Vance Humps His Couch." You then add people from your contacts to the group.  If you are a competent user of Signal, you can then restrict the permissions so that only designated admins can add people. If you are an absolute dipshit whose only job qualification is pwning the libs on Twitter, you would create a group about war plans and not know about or activate this functionality.

If you are in a group and are allowed to add members, either because you are an admin or because the admin was raised on lead paint milkshakes, you then must do the following to add someone:

Click on "JD Vance Humps His Couch"
Scroll down to "Add Members."
Select one or more people from your phone's contact list.
Click "Update"
Confirm that yes, you want to add that member.

This is impossible to do accidentally. 

Then, once you have gone through the multi-step process of adding a member, an announcement appears on the screen for literally everyone in the group to see: "JD Vance Has Added Chairry to the Group." This sentence is a line in a single-stream text thread and if anyone is reading their messages they cannot miss it. (If they are not reading their messages, one might wonder why they have been included on the chat to begin with.)

At this point, anyone can say in the chat or privately, Hey JD, why are you adding the bedroom-eyed plush chair from Pee-Wee's Playhouse to our chat about your upholstery problem?

Yet nobody in the war bro chat said a thing about the new member added to the group.

One other thing: Signal is supposedly a secure chat platform, but it is only as secure as whatever else people are doing on their phones. For example, if you send someone a Signal message asking about how to best protect your sensitive man parts against the sharp springs inside the voluptuous crack of your La-Z-Boy, you will later see ads in your browser for La-Z-Boy lube because your browser is spying on the things you do on your phone, even if the tech bros say they are not.

So even if the war bro chat were not full of hires from an affirmative action program for white fascist sycophants who graduated in the top 99% of their class, and they actually practiced basic common sense and literacy in maintaining their war bro chat, it would still be an insecure way of discussing matters of national security.

It was a setup. They wanted to see if Jeffrey would publish confidential information in the Atlantic.  He passed the test. 

He really had to bring Chairy into this?

Cowboy Curtis would not be amused.

well, you actually have to be pretty stupid to be a white supremacist, so there's that.

I agree with Trailhead. It smells like a set up.

Highly bothered that big bird is being besmirched in this situation

And no I don't care if he's supposed to be the good guy

Just leave a muppet out of this

Big Bird is on the administration's hit list.  Seriously:

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/25/nx-s1-5340686/pbs-npr-congress-hearing-ma...

Because we all know that the Splendid Table and Travel with Rick Steves are part of a sinister communist plot. 

Boy, reading that thread to day is pretty dumbfounding. 

Pete "Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus.  2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks.........."  

bahahahaha  

Boy, reading that thread to day is pretty dumbfounding. 

Pete "Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus.  2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks.........."  

bahahahaha  

Also - quote from Hegseth in 2016 regarding Hillary's  server:

"'How damaging is it to your ability to recruit or build allies with others when they are worried that our leaders may be exposing them because of their gross negligence or their recklessness in handling information?'"

Full text released. Not a good look

The administration spent all day yesterday trying to convince the public it was ok because no "classified' information was discussed.  Today, they are screaming bloody murder about the Atlantic releasing the texts because they contain classified information.   You can't make this shit up.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/26/us/trump-news/ddef27b0-5205-57d2...

the original sin here is using Signal to communicate maters of national security to begin with

Anyone who has ever done anything illegal knows signal is the #1 app where people who transact illegally have some level of privacy 

To me; the "tell" is that nobody involved in this text chain (at any point) ever raised an issue with the use of it. Not ONE.

At any time; any person involved could have simply asked "is this really the appropriate platform for this discussion?"

that this never happened indicates use of signal is a normal, acceptable, comfortable, "secure" portal for top secret communications among national security officials

Translation = this is standard practice. All this other chatter about what's classified and what's not, or who was included and how they gained access, or what specifics were or weren't being discussed etc is just to create distance from this fact.

> the original sin here is using Signal

And running it on a personal phone compounds that sin.

I don't think you could get away with running this app on a government phone to begin with

and even if it were technically possible, folks a directorate wouldn't want to know about their use of unauthorized software (government IT goons and bean counters) would definitely know they were using it.

> I don't think you could get away with running this app on a government phone to begin with

I didn't consider that, so maybe the original sin is using a personal phone then. I thought high ranking mucky mucks are supposed to use government phones for government business. I recall that Trump didn't want to give his phone up in his first term when he was still about the Twitter, but somehow they convinced him he had to.

i mean a even a sys admin has 2 phones...

drain the swap and only the idiots are stuck in the mud.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pete-hegseth-mike-waltz-tulsi...

So why would any of these clowns have Goldberg's contact information saved in their Signal app?  The guy they claim is corrupt, dangerous and gd know what else they said about him.  A lot of people are saying one these clowns is a leaker - why else would they have his contact info saved on their encrypted app?  

If this had been done by a soldier they would face court martial and spend at least 20 years in military prison.

Secretary of Defensiveness 

The real beauty for them is that nothing will come of it and no accountability will be had and it will go away because 10,000 other new terrible things will imminently happen 

^ Agreed

>>>nothing will come of it and no accountability will be had and it will go away because 10,000 other new terrible things will imminently happen<<<

That's their entire strategy; saturate the scene daily with so much bullshit that no one piece of bullshit can be focused on.

It's a "smart" strategy, and it has been working.

Sieg Heil.

It's springtime for Hitler in Mar-a-Lago.