White House Briefing on the Fall of a Magazine: “Trusted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a Clue to the Military”
The White House continues to downplay a highly sensitive discussion with national security officials on the open-source messaging app that leaked to a reporter.
At a White House briefing Wednesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the media “continues to be focused on a sensationalized story from the failing Atlantic magazine that is falling apart by the hour.”
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally included in the Signal discussion and exposed it, published the entire text exchange Wednesday after officials minimized their actions, maintaining that nothing classified was discussed. The Signal group included the defense secretary and top intelligence officials in the Trump administration as they discussed an ongoing military operation in Yemen earlier this month. The new details about the group’s messages confirmed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described specific weapons systems that would launch strikes in Yemen and that he announced the beginning of the operation more than an hour before the strikes hit.
“I’ve defended spillage cases where people were going to be put out of the military or people were going to be turned out of their job within the military for violations that are just the smallest fraction of what just occurred,” Carroll said.
Pete Hegsha is a liar. This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed,” Duckworth said in a news release Wednesday. “He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.”
“There would be an immediate investigation launched,” Mulroy told NPR’s Here & Now. They would be removed from access to classified information if they did it, and then court-martialed if they did it. Everyone in the military knows that. It seems like they’re making excuses for every reason why they could be able to do it, instead of owning it and taking responsibility.
Seeing leadership share attack plans in advance on Signal is bad for troops’ spirits. The double standard is so common in the military, that it has a phrase for it: “different spanks for different ranks.”
Military officers who have sent battlefield assessments that were several years old have lost their jobs for passing the information over an unsecured channel, Carroll said. He defended a junior Marine Corps officer in court who sent urgent, potentially lifesaving information to fellow officers in Afghanistan from a nonclassified email server and was relieved of duty.
Kevin said that when something is as serious as this, the person is fired immediately. He says there’s no doubt what would have happened to an active-duty officer who had participated in the Signal chat.
What have we learnt from the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency? Three more takeaways from the day after his first term
We’ll be covering what you need to know every Friday during the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Get more updates and analysis in the NPR Politics newsletter.
A reporter was apparently added to a Signal group chat of high-ranking Trump administration officials. There’s been more than one headline. The tariffs could raise the price of cars. More controversy was created over Trump’s deportation efforts. There are questions about the administration’s approach to the war.
Here are five takeaways from the week, followed by a day-by-day look at everything that happened this week on this 67th day of the second Trump presidency:
Not only has the Pentagon said the app, while convenient, warned of using it for nonpublic official information. These conversations should be preserved and Archives, but they were to disappear on the app by the National Security Adviser according to the released texts from The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.
- Lawmakers want more information on how a reporter was added to the chat, and Trump officials and their congressional supporters have tried to make it seem that way.
Are you talking Hegseth? How can HeGSeth be a part of it? Trump said, responding to a reporter’s question. “He had nothing to do with it. Look, look — it’s all a witch hunt.”
The bipartisan group of lawmakers wants an investigation, which isn’t the end of the story. Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said the conversation “appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature that, based on my knowledge, I would have wanted it classified.”
He called for an expedited inspector general’s report, though that may prove difficult. One day after he was sworn into office, Trump fired more than a dozen IGs in multiple agencies.
Source: Signal chat fallout, tariff tension — and 3 more takeaways from Trump’s week
The Impact of Trade Barriers on Auto-Positive U.S. Prices, Immigration and the Tren de Aragua Anomaly
And this week, it’s 25% tariffs on foreign-made cars and car parts that are likely to lead to higher auto prices. Trump knows that his tariffs may make things more expensive.
He is gambling that these tariffs will increase U.S. manufacturing and even out trade imbalances in the future. The auto worker union is happy to see that Trump ended the free-trade disaster. But will people accept higher prices on groceries and cars when they’re already high?
“Now voters are saying, ‘OK, you’ve been elected; we know you’re going to be disruptive; we know you’re going to be that wrecking ball,'” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, “‘but where’s the reduced cost of living I was looking for?'”
Soltis Anderson said while Trump’s overall approval ratings are higher than where he was in his first term, his economic approval has slipped. The Consumer Confidence Index fell to a 12-year low this week. That is quite the risky position for a president, especially one who promised to bring prices down on Day 1. If prices go up, it might affect the GOP in next year’s elections because Trump won’t be running again.
One of the areas where Americans give Trump his highest marks is on immigration. The administration continues to push the limits of its arguments in the courts. This week, the administration refused to give a judge more details on its timeline on deportation flights of Venezuelans the administration says are members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
An appeals panel, 2-1, sided with Boasberg and denied the administration’s push to restart deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, noting that the administration hasn’t given those targeted the chance to prove they’re not part of the gang before sending them to a country they’re not even from where they’re imprisoned for an indefinite period of time. The Supreme Court will be appealing the case.
A doctoral student at Tufts University was taken into custody off the street by plain-clothesed officers with face coverings and whisked away to a detention facility in Louisiana. The student, a Turkish national, was in the U.S. on a valid student visa. But that visa has since been revoked.
“This is not about free speech, this is about the safety of Columbia University students and employees”, Secretary of State Marco Rivera said when asked about the case. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. We’re talking about… No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
Source: Signal chat fallout, tariff tension — and 3 more takeaways from Trump’s week
Why does Trump want to end anti-semitism in campus life? An update from the American Oversight High Court of Laws (High Court)
More Americans’ sympathies lie with Israelis than Palestinians, but it’s at the lowest level in at least a quarter century since Gallup data is available on the question and, for the first time, below 50%. More Republicans have sympathy for Israelis, more Democrats for Palestinians. Democrats’ support has spiked as the war has carried on. Independents narrowly side with Israelis.
So Trump may feel he has public opinion on his side to continue with these kinds of expulsions and may try to make the debate about: 1. this not being about the war in Gaza at all, but 2. about ending anti-semitism on campuses. The question is, does the United States have enough space for a discussion about what constitutes antisemitism and whether people have a right to criticize the country’s conduct of the war? The administration is bluntly making the point that certainly not if you’re a foreign student.
“Defendants’ use of a non-classified commercial application even for such life-and-death matters as planning a military operation leads to the inevitable inference that Defendants must have used Signal to conduct other official government business,” American Oversight’s attorneys wrote in a court filing.
The judge later said that he was glad they could figure out a solution. He requested that the government give him an update Monday. Boasberg said his order will expire April 10 “in the event that Defendants’ measures are satisfactory to the Court.”
Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that Hegseth was responsible for determining whether the information was classified.
Comment on “Defending Yemen’s Houthis with a Mobile Phone App” by J. J. Boasberg, the Censor, and Attorney General
American Oversight’s attorneys argued that the public is entitled to access government records even if they are auto-deleting messages that originated on officials’ private phones.
This is a systematic effort to avoid the rules for record retention in the federal government, they wrote. There is no reason for this behavior and it prevents the public and Congress from knowing the actions of the government.
On the chat, Hegseth provided the exact timings of warplane launches and when bombs would drop before the attacks against Yemen’s Houthis began earlier this month. Hegseth laid out when a “strike window” would open, where a “target terrorist” was located and when weapons and aircraft would be used.
WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to preserve records of a text message chat in which senior national security officials discussed sensitive details of plans for a U.S. military strike against Yemen’s Houthis.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg barred administration officials from destroying messages that were sent over the encrypted messaging app Signal earlier this month.
A nonprofit watchdog, American Oversight, requested the order. The administration was taking steps to collect and save the messages.
Boasberg, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, noted during Thursday’s hearing that his order shouldn’t harm the government since the agencies already were working to preserve the Signal messages.
Boasberg, chief judge of the district court in Washington, has been at odds with the administration over a separate case involving flights deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law. He temporarily blocked the flights and ordered at least two planes carrying immigrants to turn around, but that didn’t happen. The judge plans to find out if the administration ignored his order.
