Heads must roll for Signal-chat debacle

One reason is accountability. As the former chief people officer of the Air Force and the Space Force, I know that if any Airman or Guardian or civilian employee were discovered to have shared top-secret information on their personal devices, it would be the end of their career and likely would result in a court-martial or criminal referral to the Justice Department. To fail to hold, say, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accountable would be to undermine the military’s crucial dedication to operational security and to send the corrosive message that leaders are held to a lower standard than their troops.

It’s not even a close call. These actions violate the most basic cyber hygiene, as all cleared personnel are reminded during their annually required "Cybersecurity Awareness" training. Indeed, fewer than six months have passed since Jack Teixeira, the former Air National Guardsman from Massachusetts, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for sharing top-secret classified information on a social-media platform to impress his friends.

And while many people will recall then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as “extremely careless,” I was working as Chief of Staff to the Army Secretary when news broke that then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter used his personal email address for routine scheduling and travel logistics because of convenience. It was an unforced error and contrary to the Presidential Records Act, but of course Carter knew better than to include any classified information on such an unsecured platform.

Anyone who has served in government, but particularly those who require access to the highest level of classification, will find it impossible to believe that our nation's most senior national-security officials were unaware of the Teixeira, Clinton, and Carter incidents.

Nor could they be ignorant of Signal’s well-known vulnerability to the intelligence and collection capabilities of our adversaries. Take Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, two chat participants who happen to be former members of Congress. During their service on intelligence committees, they joined enough classified briefings in secure Capitol Hill rooms to know, as Goldberg reports, that Waltz’s decision to set Signal to delete the group’s messages after four or seven days would not keep our adversaries from reading them.

Given all this, one searches for a logical reason to hold sensitive conversations on such a platform. One explanation is that the officials are simply too incompetent to realize that the dangers of their group chat outweigh its convenience. Another is that they care less that a potential enemy might overhear them than that their discussion might eventually become, as federal records laws require, part of the public record.

Another might be—stay with me now—that it is part of a calculated, albeit incredibly risky, diplomatic strategy. Perhaps Waltz initiated the Signal chat as a backdoor method of communicating to Russia, China, and perhaps Israel, a kind of confidence-building measure to prevent “misunderstandings about military actions and policies, and to foster cooperation and inter-dependency.” Think something along the lines of “the hotline” red telephone between the White House and the Kremlin during the Cold War.

I realize such an assessment seems awfully far-fetched.

But by now, just two months into Donald Trump’s second term, allies and adversaries alike have surely realized that the American president’s daily musings cannot be taken seriously as the official position of Washington. Trump has said too much about his designs on Greenland (“one way or another”), his delusions about absorbing Canada, and his estimation of Vladimir Putin as a “genius” for invading Ukraine.

No matter what Waltz and this crew think they’re doing, this isn’t a reality TV show. When it comes to the incredibly complex game of global diplomacy, these officials are not playing chess—they're playing Russian roulette, with America's national security and intelligence infrastructure.

We’re long past the Trump who reveled in telling the amateurs on The Apprentice: “You’re fired!” It’s already clear he won’t do it with the novices in his cabinet. It’s time for those remaining members of Congress who care about America’s standing in the world to hold them accountable.

Alex Wagner served as assistant Air Force secretary for manpower and reserve affairs during the Biden administration. ]]>