Bulwark Takes - Signal Chat Disaster: Trump Admin Hypocrites Crushed by Their Own Past Words

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

In the wake of the Signal text disaster leaking war plans, we took a look back at what Trump officials said about previous leaks. It’s not pretty. JVL and Sarah Longwell break it all down.

Hey there, everyone. It's me, JVL, here with my best friend, Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. And we had kind of a bombshell story today in The Atlantic. Editor Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he was just sort of looped in on a signal chat by a bunch of the highest-ranking officials in the U.S. government as they planned and discussed military operations out in the open. Mr. President, your reaction to the story of the Atlantic that said that some of your top cabinet officials and aides had been discussing very sensitive material through Signal and included an Atlantic reporter for that. What is your response to that? I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of the Atlantic. To me,

it's a magazine that's going out of business. It is the worst breach of security and comms in maybe the history of the United States government. And Sarah, you're here with some receipts. So here's the thing. Obviously, we already taped one of these. JVL and I hopped on. We read the story. We gave our reactions. Go watch that one if you haven't. But then I just said to my team, guys, I want every let's go find all the videos of everybody who was on that chain talking about Hillary Clinton had classified or top secret or sensitive information that was not secured properly, it may have cost her the 2016 election and it became the dominant reason why Republicans said she shouldn't be trusted. And so these Republicans have some choice words about people who do not handle our national security secrets with the utmost care and attention. Let's listen to Signal Chain participant, our Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, circa 2016. When I'm president of the United States, neither she nor any of the other people are going to be above the law, whether it's her or Eric Holder for what he did on Fast and Furious or any of these other folks. They're

going to people are going to be held accountable if they broke the laws of this country. This president obviously is willing to protect his political cronies, but we're going to hold people accountable. Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton, even though she thinks she is. So this is important because there's a theme to these clips and what the Republicans were saying, which is accountability was the word of the day, the watchword. If Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted, we must have accountability. Before we move on to the next one, though, Sarah, does it give you a little bit of joy to hear Marco say when I am president? Because I can tell you when you're going to be president, Marco fucking day after never. And you know what?

He was always this guy. It's just we didn't know. And if there was one upside to, you know, Donald Trump, it is that he revealed a number of people to be the callow individuals that they are. And speaking of callow individuals, I would like to get to this Stephen Miller tweet. One point that doesn't get made enough about Hillary's unsecured server illegally used to conduct state business, obviously created to hide the Clinton's corrupt pay for play. Foreign adversaries could easily hack classified ops and intel in real time from the other side of the globe. Interesting point, Stephen Miller. Interesting point. So are you telling me that if the secretary of defense is just sitting around

at night, go and tweeting you up to some people and sit like up Tulsi, you up John Ratcliffe. We're going to wage war in Yemen. You telling me the Chinese and the Russians could maybe be up on your phone about that? Seems like maybe they could. JVL, what do you think? You know, I would like to add there's a there's one very crucial difference to this, which is that if you were on the other end of Secretary Clinton's emails, there was no way for you to know what server the emails were being hosted on. Whereas

if you were on the signal chat, all you had to do was look at the list of people on the chain, and you would have seen Jeffrey Goldberg. It was right there. So literally every one of these people had access because all they had to do was tap. I know if you haven't used Signal, it's very complicated to look at the people on your chain. You have to tap the group to get their names. And so they could all see it and know that they were communicating out in the open with the media but perhaps it wasn't top-notch operational security as they decided to wage a war they decided to drop bombs okay wasn't even like they weren't playing in the softball game for the weekend here. Okay. All right. Let's get to Pete Hegseth.

Okay. Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who should never ever have been confirmed in the first place. Let's listen to how he thinks one should be treated. If one does not protect top secret information. She's got two problems here. Two words, top secret. Before it was servers, it was classified. It was sort of this amorphous idea that maybe it was wrong. Everyone knows what top secret means.

I've got a top secret clearance. It's big red flashing letters, top secret. You know, when you're looking at something that's top secret or dealing with it, in this case, the public will resonate with that. Hey, if you're hiding that on a private server, that's a very real problem. And likely criminal charges to follow if they're very clear about it. Likely criminal charges. Let's get to this other Pete Hegg, Seth Wan, and then we can talk about Pete. Let's do this. If this were a Republican divulging the secrets of our nation at the very highest level.

The very highest level. There will be outrage across the board. But here, it's covered up. It's incredible. The double standard is incredible. Imagine if it was, I don't know, Donald Trump, what the media would be doing to him right now, eviscerating him. Or imagine if it was a member of the military, which we've seen from General Cartwright and General Petraeus. They still go after these guys for a tiny, tiny fraction of what she willfully did and betrayed her country in doing so, supposedly for convenience, but actually so she could have a different set of standards and hide her conduct and the conduct

of the Clinton Foundation, Benghazi, everything else else so she could stay away from and above the law. And it turns out foreign services want to know what our secretary of state thinks. And this instance, they did whatever they could to break an unsecure server in her basement. It tells you everything you need to know. It's actually worse than that, because some of those emails using that unsecured private server were to and from the president of the united states or home foreign intelligence services were reading the emails of president obama i don't believe we've ever seen anything like that before ever

no of course not and potentially in real time the technology uh... that that others can use once they've got into devices is to listen and see in real time who knows what they have and the kind of leverage that that gives in negotiations or conversations when you know what our hand is and you can anticipate it or get in front of it or you know our sources and methods because we know aids to Hillary Clinton also removed markings so that they could send classified sometimes seeker top secret information to her personal email which our enemies were potentially reading in

real time that has consequences including lives and reputation of this great country. OK, lot to unpack here. Sarah, can we start with the question about the media reaction? Because, Barry, if you could do this for us, could we have a live look at the Fox News dot com homepage right now as we're taping six hours after the story broke huh okay so we got the trending topics trump's first hundred days mia love snow white and tiger woods okay so the next one first on fox trump allies move to prevent activist judges from oversight okay so surely the second story right well oh did snow white-hating star tank the box office? The numbers are in.

Okay. Then Trump taps to Lena Baba. Then Bill Maher plans to go see... Okay, then Europe is urging... Issue a traveling warning about having to follow biology. The IRS could get Stacey Abrams. George Clooney is surprised. Kidnapped six-year-old police crash.

Bacardi's bikini, killing what's new pussy. I don't see it anywhere, Sarah. Literally nowhere. I cannot believe that the media would have this double standard. But it's not like they're doing cleanup on it yet. Yet.

They're just not saying anything while they all get their story straight because I promise you by tomorrow, Fox will be all over this like white on rice. And I don't want to impugn our fellow journalists' reputations over at Fox, but I have a feeling they're going to figure out some way to say that, eh, it's not so bad.

So this, I do want to just note this tulsi gabbard also on the signal chain now she's talking about an unauthorized release of classified information and to be clear i guess it wasn't that they were like leaking information uh they just were doing it in such a ham-fisted, insecure, unsecure way, and then included a reporter. They just didn't even know who was on their signal chain. This is the point. They just don't even know who's on their signal chain.

They could have seen by tapping the list with their finger. Yeah. So would you say this was an unauthorized release of classified information? I mean. Or is it just an oopsie Or is it just an oopsie? Is it just an oopsie? The big... And you and I talked about this

in the earlier video. The question is, do we... Are you willing to believe that this is the only conversation happening within the executive branch off the books? That this just happens to include

the DNI, the Sec State, Sec Def, Stephen Miller, the Chief of Staff, all of these other people, and this is the only one of those being taken outside of the channels which are secure and authorized and which keep records? Yeah. If you didn't watch this before, we talked about this in our last video and it's an important one. The reason they're doing this on Signal

is so that it's deleted automatically, right? So there's no record of it. And so, so much of the 2016 commentary is about the cover-up, the cover-up of Hillary Clinton. This is why she's doing it this way, so they can cover it all up. Our entire government right now, there's no way they were doing bomb Yemen signal threads, and they're not using signal threads for everything else.

If you're literally doing your most sensitive business on signal, you're doing all the rest of it on signal too, because all of it then deletes, which meaning there's no records for our government of the things that they're doing now. Sarah, question. It's illegal. It's all super illegal. Okay, sure. But on the other hand, are you willing to give them partial credit for using Signal and not Twitter DMs? Yeah, or just like a regular text chain, just like Apple.

Terms of service allow Elon to read everybody's DMs. If you send a DM on Twitter, Elon is allowed to read it. And so at least they had the presence of mind to use Signal. I'm Ron Burgundy. No. No partial credit for that. They literally build rooms called skiffs to share this kinds of sensitive information. There is like a war room, an actual situation room where you go discuss things like this.

You don't do it with everybody just on like a random signal chain. Okay? Yeah. You just don't. I'm sorry. We got one more from Pete. Pete Hegseth was everywhere on this issue. And so for him to be like the organizer of the signal chain is the best. It's just the best. Let's watch this issue. And so for him to be like the organizer of the signal chain

is the best. It's just the best. Let's watch this one. Apparently, the standard operating procedure inside the Clinton secretary of state office was to send emails that couldn't otherwise be printed to the maid to print them out of a secure area or from a secure area and then hand them off. Any security professional, military, government or otherwise, would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information. The fact that she wouldn't be held accountable for this, I think, blows the mind of anyone who's held our nation's secrets dear, who's had a top secret clearance like I have and

others who know that even one hiccup causes a problem, let alone a standard procedure like this. That one's my favorite, actually. Just anyone who holds our national security dear, JVL. And here's what's funny. None of it's funny. But here's, it's not like these guys who are now doing this on Signal aren't doing it with full and complete awareness that they're operating outside of all of the things they talked about. Full and complete awareness. They can't plead like, I didn't realize.

Like the George Costanza, oh, was that wrong? Was that wrong? Yeah. It's amazing. And, you know, I mean, look, I got to say, I'm a little surprised that giving the sec def job to a weekend co-anchor who likes to party turned out like this. I mean, I would have thought based on his resume that Pete Hegseth would be a super serious guy who could be trusted to make grown-up decisions. I mean, who could have predicted that his tenure would end up like this after what, like four minutes? I'm sorry. You know what? Oh, God, I need to tweet this. I don't think Pete Hegseth has stopped drinking on the job. Because this is just drunken frat guy behavior i uh actually i'm sorry i'm impugning the i'm impugning the integrity of frat boys there and i don't mean to because i like frat guys i

don't like pete hegseth did pete send any like beer emojis this is no i don't think in jeffrey's reporting we've gotten any you know what emojis did the Secretary of Defense use? I think that was only other members. So I want to stand for him. It was not Pete Hegseth who did prayer hand, prayer hand, bicep flex, America, America. That was not Pete Hegseth, which to be honest, shocks me. So go ahead. I got one more because this is one of my favorites too. And this is, there's a reason. Sarah, I'm going to fucking die of schadenfreude right now. This is our CIA director. Our CIA director. Are they supposed to keep secrets?

Do you know what CIA directors know? I mean, not ours at the moment, but most. Do you know what they know? They know how to get information that other people handle indelicately. And so here, let's listen to our current CIA director, John Ratcliffe, talking about what should happen to someone who mishandles classified information. What do you think should happen, John? Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the SB on Ajax. It started with Hillary Clinton.

It has continued without accountability. People haven't paid a price for that and that's one of the reasons uh bill barr and john durham and folks need to really focus on that because um there does need to be accountability there there needs to be accountability jamiel i want i want again just in case anybody didn't watch our first video i want to read to you so that you understand we aren't just clowning on this because of the hypocrisy. I am going to read from Jeff Goldberg's piece. At 1144 a.m., the account labeled Pete Hegseth posted a signal in a team update. This is Jeff Goldberg. I will not quote from this update or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East Central Command's area

of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing. So this is a, we're talking about real stuff. This could have gotten our people killed. I mean, I, you know. Thank God you put an editor of a major magazine and like who understood rules and understood how to not leak this uh as opposed to i don't know accidentally just like adding putin to a signal chain or i mean you do already have a russian surrogate on there because tulsi's on there so i know how much less uh secure could we already get. But like, this is beyond shocking behavior.

Like, because here's the thing. It's not just that they're all communicating on Signal about things that are this important. It's that they're inadvertently adding people. They don't even know who's on it. Who else is fat fingered into this, right? And again, all you have to do is look at the number. Look at who's in the group.

It's not hidden. It's not secret. Just you tap that part. I am sure that we will have to do another one of these videos tomorrow once the Republicans get their story straight. But can I ask you to guess tomorrow morning when the wagons circle? Sure. And they will. A, will anybody be sacrificed? So will like, will Waltz, will Michael Waltz, the National Security Advisor, will he get thrown to the wolves because he was kind of a normie anyway?

It was never real MAGA. Or would that be seen as weakness? And what will the story be? What will the line be on this? So I've seen a couple things emerge already and sometimes like the average person quickly becomes like the id of whatever, like the administration's gonna do

because like, oh, this is how our people are with us. One is I've seen people be like, this is just them being transparent this is what transparency looks like you idiots uh just invite reporters into their conversation hostile reporters and what more could you ask for this is just us being straight up okay so i think that's one of them okay potential uh second one is 10-dimensional chess, guys. 10-dimensional chess. I don't exactly know what the 10 moves are that they're going to come up with,

but, oh, there was one that was like, this is just, they wanted a reporter to see how mad they are at Europe. And so they had him on a single chain. With the Europeans, yeah. Yeah. This is how they hold the Europeans to be remunerated? Remunerated? How do you say that again?

Remuneration. Yeah. This is how, right? We included reporters so that it would be on the books for the Europeans having to pay us our money. That's possible. Breaking. Sarah, Fox has changed their homepage while we were recording.

We're going to do another live look at it. What are you seeing? Oh, it's that Pete Hegseth must resign. Just kidding. Trump border czar unloads on state as report shows it's releasing illegals charged with horrific crimes. Guess what? You know that this is bad because they are definitely pivoting to immigration.

Like, you know when things are bad. Caravan. We've got to talk about immigration. Tomorrow morning by 9 a.m., by the time Fox and Friends goes to their A block, we're going to have another caravan coming up from down Mexico way. Here's what I want to say in sum, in closing. These people are all hypocrites. We should make them choke on their own words around accountability for what happens to people who treat America's secrets cavalierly and do not take operational security with any meaningful sense of, you know, protecting America's interest. And I don't think people have, and JBL, sometimes you can be a little bit like this. You can be like, will anybody care? Will it matter? LOL, nothing matters. Make this one stick, guys. Hillary Clinton's email stuck in 2016. This is one of the most outrageous security breaches that our country has seen in half a century, and we should not let it go. Do not move on tomorrow. This is not a small thing. We might be making fun of them here, but every single one of them is on the record taking a position on this. And their position is people who do this should be fired,

should be held accountable, maybe should be held criminally liable. So let's go do that. We'll be back tomorrow with more on the fallout from this. Hit like, hit subscribe, follow the channel, ride with us. Good luck, America.