Signalgate: What If a Democrat Had Done This?
Matt Bernardini compares the current Signal messaging security debacle to the furore over Hillary Clinton and 'her emails', and points to what the Democrats should do in response
One of the favorite political games the left in America likes to play is “what if.” Specifically, what if a Democrat had done this? And recently we were given a great topic for the next round of the game, with the revelations that the Trump administration inadvertently disclosed war plans and more classified information to a journalist in a group chat.
If you haven’t heard by now, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic Magazine, was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat by Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. The chat consisted of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top Trump associates discussing planned strikes on Yemen. It was an egregious operational security breach as the participants casually discussed classified information on unsecured phones, without even knowing who was in the chat. One message reportedly identified an active US intelligence officer.
And days later, the Pentagon has come out and said that Signal was vulnerable to hacks.
Even Republican Rep. Don Bacon, a former Air Force brigadier general, said that this was absolutely not the way to conduct these kinds of sensitive discussions.
“None of this should have been sent on non-secure systems. Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone,” Bacon said.
As the experts at digital law and policy journal Just Security note, these kinds of disclosures may have violated two important national security laws relating to mishandling of national defense information and destruction of Government records.
The latter applies because it appears that some of the messages in the group chat had been set to automatically delete after one week. Written communications between administration officials which discuss official policy do not belong to those who send them. They are the property of the US Government and it is crucial that those records be retained, so that Americans can know what their Government is doing.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe could also be on the hook for perjury. They had testified to Congress that there was no classified information on the Signal thread. New York Congressman Jerry Nadler has called for the two to be prosecuted.
“The latest text messages confirm that in yesterday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe lied under oath in their testimony,” Nadler said. “Perjury is a crime, and they should be prosecuted.”
The scandal continues to grow everyday as some calls for the firing of Hegseth and Waltz begin to be heard. The egregious and frankly obviously sloppy nature of this scandal, combined with the attempted cover-up, raise the question, what if a Democrat had done this?
Luckily we have an answer. You may remember the whole saga around Hillary Clinton’s emails. It’s not quite apples to apples, this current scandal is far worse. But it gives the Democrats a template for how to handle Signalgate and ensure the Trump administration is held to account.
Several years ago, Republicans created a years-long political warfare campaign against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, from 2009-2013. While her doing this was not advisable, subsequent investigations found that the material on there was innocuous and did not violate any laws. However, this didn’t stop Republicans from creating an entire media narrative around Clinton that likely helped to swing the 2016 election for Trump.
After former FBI Director James Comey announced in July 2016 that no criminal charges would be brought in the Clinton email investigation, Republicans responded by issuing more than 70 subpoenas to Clinton, her foundation, and her associates. This had the effect of generating a months-long cycle of negative media coverage that started on the right-wing and made its way into mainstream media
One study found that Clinton’s emails got more coverage on front-pages in 6 days, then the policy positions of candidates did in two months. The entire campaign culminated with Comey notifying Congress just a week before the election that the FBI would be reopening the email investigation. To many experts, this announcement, more than any other single event, helped swing the election towards Trump.
Upon reviewing the campaign coverage by the mainstream media, researchers from the Columbia Journalism Review concluded that “this intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election.”
The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, did not seem to regret his paper’s focus on the email issue when asked about it by New Yorker editor David Remnick.
“I’ve heard thirty different arguments about what tilted the balance of that election,” Sulzberger said. “I hate going down any one of these rabbit holes because, as we know, every group in this era has one version of that argument.”
Steve Bannon infamously said that the goal of their movement was to “flood the zone” with so many events that the news would never be able to focus on one single scandal. Through the first Trump administration, it worked, with Trump committing scandal after scandal, so that none of them seemed to stick for more than a week.
However, because the current Signalgate scandal was so blatant and indefensible, Democrats finally have a chance to beat Bannon’s strategy. They should continue to focus on this, with more Democrats calling for investigations and prosecutions everyday. Force the mainstream media to continue to cover the story. Ensure that there are more front-page headlines about the Trump administration being careless with classified information than there ever were about Clinton’s emails.
It would be poetic if one scandal helped bring down Trump, like it brought down Clinton.