#Signalgate

[liberalsarecool]

Trump Cabinet reports directly to Mossad with modified Signal app, Russia with the original Signal app. #SpyingForDummies

Entire mission of Trump National Secuity is to serve our adversaries US Top Secrets for kickbacks.

The non-stop security threats are a result of electing a felon fraud rapist who eliminated FBI background checks and nominates the greediest of billionaire villains.

Truth is, Mike Waltz is guilty of endless crimes. [Crimes that MAGA would demand prison if it were a Democrat.] But Waltz was not fired. He was given another elite position to fuck up: Ambassador to the UN.

And right on brand, Republicans in Congress are a 1000% complicit.

[saywhat-politics]

(CNN) — House Republicans have thwarted Democratic efforts to probe Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s controversial use of Signal, using their power to stop the minority party from forcing a vote that could embarrass the Trump administration.

GOP leaders tucked a provision into a rule approved Tuesday that effectively prevents Democrats from forcing a vote on “resolutions of inquiry,” a tool often used by the minority to try to launch an investigation. Such resolutions typically fail, but with controversy mounting over Hegseth’s use of Signal to communicate military plans, Republicans wanted to avoid a vote that could succeed in the narrowly divided chamber if just a handful of GOP members broke ranks.

[eugenedebs1920]

America is a representative democratic constitutional republic. The idea being that the American citizens are given voice by electing representatives who speak on their behalf upon the concerns and appeals of their constituents.

What this maga shift of antidemocratic idolization of a single person, of a single branch has given rise to through the feckless capitulation of House and Senate Republicans is the dissolution of representative democratic processes imperative to a republic for, and by the people. To alter the rules for the sole purpose of squashing debate is to silence the voices of the American citizens who nominated and elected a legislator to communicate their petitions for them.

Again! Another example of the hypocrisy of maga. The claims of allegiance and respect for America yet the willingness to subvert the Constitution and a betrayal, showing the disdain for it.

I think EVERYONE knows that Whiskey Pete Hegseth is MASSIVELY unqualified for the monumental role of such dire consequence he was placed in. Beyond that the flagrant disregard to the lives and safety of those serving our nation, protecting our freedoms, is grounds for removal and is more than justification for the minimum request of an inquiry.

The elected representatives in the “GOP” are in violation of the oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Their loyalty is to a demagogue rather than their constituents, in contrast to the Constitution. It’s time they show the integrity that those in such positions of honor are obliged to by doing their job and standup for democracy. Particularly this one…

Support the troops by removing Hegseth and installing competency.

[contemplatingoutlander]

It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb. This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach. In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.

FINALLY, a major Democratic leader speaks up and trashes Trump's reign of stupidity and cruelty!

And of course, it's a woman: Hillary Clinton, who must be appalled at how easily Trump has dismissed "Signalgate," which was far worse than anything Clinton did with her "emails."

This is a gift 🎁 link, so there is no paywall. Enjoy!

[victusinveritas]

[paddysnuffles]

[makingdonalddrumpfagain]

‼️

[charlesoberonn]

[lost-carcosa]

In the past month, Trump has threatened to imprison peaceful protest organizers, falsely declared a national invasion, invoked war powers in time of peace, serially ignored court orders, and sent people to an El Salvador prison without due process or review, all while making outrageous comments meant to distract the public from his administration’s illegal conduct.

This week served up the capper when we learned that Trump officials are coordinating their actions on Signal, an app with an auto delete feature, in violation of multiple federal laws requiring communications to be preserved and protected.

All angles spell danger for the Republic

The Signal breach is appalling from all sides, each so dangerous it is hard to determine which angle is more threatening from a national security perspective:

That Secretary of Defense Hegseth sloppily jeopardized the lives of US service members, or his reflexive, dry drunk anger at being asked about it.

That Trump didn’t appear to know (or remember) anything about the scandal several hours after it broke on international news, or that he doesn’t understand why it matters.

That his spokes child tried (again) to discredit the media, or that she thinks “war plan” vs. “attack plan” is a meaningful semantic distinction when targets, weaponry, and attack sequencing are revealed to enemy eyes.

That the national security advisor went on Fox News to take ‘full responsibility’ for the Signal error, or that he then called the Atlantic editor ‘scum’ for reporting the story in the first place.

That Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, doesn’t know that US intelligence laws apply to all“national defense information,” not just “classified information,” or Trump’s irrelevant, false messaging that “no classified information” was included on the Signal exchange.

As the absurdity of this clown car of ignorance and arrogance unfolds, the most dangerous aspect of it has, at least so far, received the least media attention: Trump advisors are exchanging official communications on an app deliberately set to delete all evidence of their communications, which appears to be their standard operating procedure.

Trump’s team is breaking federal law by deleting evidence

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, testified this week at a Congressional hearing that the Signal app came “pre-installed on government devices,” suggesting its use was not limited to the Yemen fiasco. From the content of the group chat published this week by The Atlantic— only published because Trump officials kept lying about what was on it—Signal looks like the default method used by administration officials to communicate with one another. The Yemen group chat explicitly referred to another such chat, making clear that this was not their first.

Gabbard, in her testimony, did not mention Signal’s primary feature, which is a built-in option, activated by Trump officials, to automatically destroy its own contents on a pre-selected date. The Yemen screenshots show that, in coordinating their airstrikes, Trump officials set Signal to erase all messages coordinating them. Some were set to disappear after one week, and some were set to disappear after four weeks.

Deleting official communications is a federal crime, punishable by up to ten years in prison.

It is a crime to destroy any federal record

Legal mandates including the Espionage Act, the Presidential Records Act, and the Records Management by Federal Agencies Act require that ALL federal records created by the President, Vice President, cabinet agencies, and the intelligence community be preserved, protected, and produced for review by any court of jurisdiction that requires them.

Under the Espionage Act, 18 USC § 793, anyone who through gross negligence permits such information “to be removed from its proper place of custody” or allows it “to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed,” or fails to promptly report any such destruction to his superior officer “Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” Because of the typo-free and specific attack details in his lengthy texts, Hegseth appears to have cut and pasted the attack plan from a secured source into the unsecure app, thereby endangering the lives of the servicemen involved.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 2071,anyone who conceals, removes, or mutilates records “shall be fined, imprisoned not more than three years, or both and shallforfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”The disqualification is mandatory, not discretionary.

The worst takeaway from Signalgate is Trump’s attempts to block scrutiny

Even if sharing the Signal chat on Yemen was a mistake, as officials claim, choosing to set the date(s) on which all content would be destroyed could only be deliberate, a fact not lost on American Oversight. After the Signal breach was reported, American Oversight filed suit against Hegseth, Gabbard, Marco Rubio and other officials, seeking to enjoin the Trump administration from continuing to destroy evidence of their own conduct. As detailed in their complaint, Trump officials appear to be using Signal in other governance contexts as well, creating records that are deliberately destroyed in violation of the Federal Records Act and/or the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”).

The purpose of FOIA and federal records laws is transparency: to make sure we know what our government is doing, to protect American citizens from rogue and illegal government actions. Under the Constitution, this power belongs to the people.

Transparency in government is one of our oldest and most sacrosanct rights; it is what protects us from jackboots in the night. By running “off the books” official communications, Trump advisors are deliberately circumventing federal law to evade public and legal scrutiny, in line with Project 2025’s calls to conceal damning information from the public.

That Trump, his buffoonish cabinet, and the architects of Project 2025 would go to such lengths to hide what they are up to should keep every American up at night.

[short-wooloo]

The signalgate scandal really do be showin why the Jedi were right not loop Anakin in on the rako hardeen operation

Incompetent blabbermouths should not be allowed into high level covert operations, that's just basic opsec

[probablyasocialecologist]

The leaked transcript of the Signal chat contains predictably patriotic ejaculations from America’s leading eminences—a “Godspeed to our Warriors” from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a punching emoji followed by U.S. flag and fire emoji from Waltz—plus some thought-provoking glimpses of officials’ concerns about selling the assault to the U.S. public. On March 14, for example, Hegseth texted to the group: “I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what—nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” In other words, the United States is fully aware that it is bombing a country using the tax money of folks who are totally clueless about Yemen. As for the alleged “failure” of Trump’s predecessor, it’s worth recalling that Joe Biden pursued exactly the same illegal bombing approach to Yemen as the Republicans are now using, with Biden pledging in January of last year that massive air strikes would continue despite his own admission that they were not “working.” Following Goldberg’s revelations, “members of Congress in both parties exploded in anger,” Axios noted, quoting Armed Services Committee member Representative Chris Deluzio, a Democrat, as insisting: “This is an outrageous national security breach and heads should roll.” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile took to social media to warn that “this administration is playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info, and it makes all Americans less safe.” Media handwringing over the Trump administration’s seemingly apocalyptic carelessness similarly serves to further the notion that the Houthis somehow pose an existential threat to Americans, when in reality it’s Yemeni civilians who’ve been made considerably “less safe” by unfolding events. Few observers have found space amid all the ruckus to opine that perhaps the United States shouldn’t be bombing Yemen in the first place—particularly given that the undeclared war is in fact unconstitutional, lacking as it does the required authorization from Congress. Historian Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman, has remarked that, while Henry Kissinger “kept the bombing of Cambodia secret for years because the bombing itself, of a country we weren’t at war with, was illegal,” the protocol has since been revised. “Now we bomb where and whom at will, and the press and anti-Trump politicians don’t give it a thought.” Per Hegseth’s vision, such wanton assaults qualify as “reestablishing deterrence” —and to hell with the reality that twenty-plus years of bombing one of the world’s poorest countries has neither “worked” nor deterred America’s bloodlust.

16 April 2025

[liberalsarecool]

Everything he/they do is underhanded/illegal/ unAmerican.

Pete Hegseth illegally group chatting war plans vs Hillary’s emails is a perfect example of how men can knowingly commit treason, but women have to be perfect to be taken seriously.

We are not a serious country.

[aceferatu]

When is Enough, Enough?

I normally don’t get political on social media because it’s just asking for an all-out war between people who can’t even see past their own biases. But honestly? I can’t stay quiet anymore. I’m pissed. I’m beyond pissed. This administration, in just two months, has done more damage than I thought humanly possible. It’s like they’re on a mission to dismantle everything that made America remotely decent. It’s not just mistakes—they’re actively tearing down people’s lives, and it’s disgusting.

They’ve made brutal cuts to essential departments, slashed jobs left and right, and appointed a bunch of unqualified, power-hungry, incompetent idiots to lead the most critical aspects of our government. It’s like they went out of their way to find the most clueless misfits possible and handed them the keys to the country. And then they have the audacity to bring in a non-elected puppet to do whatever the hell he wants. How is this even legal? Who approved this circus of corruption and chaos?

And don't get me started on the tariff wars—with CANADA and MEXICO, of all countries! OUR ALLIES! The very countries we’ve always worked with and traded with, and now this administration thinks it’s a great idea to piss them off and start a fight? Brilliant. Just brilliant. They’re making enemies out of friends while cozying up to dictators and lunatics who couldn’t care less about us.

Oh, and now they want to take over the Gaza Strip? Annex Greenland and CANADA? Are they out of their damn minds? What the actual hell are they thinking? Do they think it’s some kind of imperial game where they can just lay claim to whatever the hell they want? What’s next? Declaring the moon as the 52nd state? This isn’t leadership—it’s lunacy.

And meanwhile, back home, legal immigrants—PEOPLE who came here the right way—are being thrown into what amounts to concentration camps at our southern border. They’re ripping families apart and shoving people into overcrowded, inhumane conditions while smugly claiming they’re “protecting the nation.” Protecting it from what? People looking for a better life?

The cost of living is still a nightmare. Remember all those promises to make groceries more affordable? Eggs are still insanely priced. Gas is through the roof. Nothing has improved, and they’re acting like it’s a victory parade. And to top it all off, they’re ignoring a MASSIVE security breach involving Signal texts that could be a national security disaster. No one is stepping up to address it. They’re too busy lining their pockets and power-tripping to give a damn.

And the press secretary? An absolute trainwreck. The most condescending, vile, and arrogant spokesperson I’ve ever seen. She treats journalists and the American people like garbage, and yet somehow, she’s still there, holding that position like it’s her birthright. Every time she opens her mouth, it’s just more lies and twisted narratives. It’s exhausting.

I genuinely don’t know how MAGA supporters can look at this mess and feel pride. I don’t know how they can stand by this madness while real, hardworking Americans are losing jobs, losing hope, losing everything they worked for. I watch videos of people breaking down because they can’t afford to put food on the table, and it breaks my heart. It makes me so damn angry because none of this had to happen. This administration isn’t fixing anything—they’re wrecking it all and pretending it’s progress.

I used to have hope. I used to think my vote meant something. I voted for Obama because he inspired me. I voted for Bernie because he gave me hope for change. I voted for Hillary because I didn’t want to see America go down this path. I voted for Biden because I thought he could stabilize things. I even voted for Harris, hoping for progress. But now? It feels like none of it mattered. It feels like this was rigged from the start, and we’re just puppets in someone else’s twisted show.

Elon Musk practically bought this administration for his own personal gain. That’s why he’s got this orange puppet wrapped around his finger, doing whatever the hell he wants. We’ve got 46 more months of this nightmare, and it feels like an eternity. We’re just watching America burn while the ones responsible throw gasoline on the flames.

And where are the Democrats? Where are the leaders who are supposed to fight back? Why isn’t anyone stepping up and speaking out with passion and purpose? Why aren’t they rallying people, pushing back with real force? Are they too scared, or do they just not care anymore? Because I’m not seeing any fire, any fight, any damn urgency from anyone who should be standing up for the people.

Every day, I wake up hoping to hear that someone finally did what needed to be done and took one for the team to eliminate the threat. Sometimes, I go back to sleep just hoping I’ll wake up to good news—news that maybe someone finally stopped this madness. Because at this point, it feels like nobody is going to save us.

I’m tired. I’m angry. I’m losing hope. The America I believed in is slipping away, and it’s being replaced by this cruel, corrupt machine that doesn’t care about the people it’s supposed to serve. And I’m done pretending it’s okay. I don’t see myself voting anymore because it’s all so rigged and pointless.

America is a goddamn dumpster fire right now, and our allies are stepping back, watching us implode while the orange man keeps pushing for more power, more control, even talking about a third term. Martial law? Probably coming. And when it does, maybe people will finally wake the hell up and see what’s been right in front of them this whole time.

I’m just exhausted from feeling helpless while everything good about this country gets ripped apart. I don’t know how to keep caring when every day feels like another blow to our sanity and our souls.

[herculeaninnuendo]

[randomaccessmike]

[timothysnyder]

This Hegseth thing is funny and all — but the unprecedented incompetence, frivolity, and treachery of the entire cabinet puts us all at very real risk.