Tangle - The Signal chat controversy and everything else we missed.

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

On Monday, March 24, The Atlantic published a partial transcript of communications among Trump administration officials as they discussed impending military operations against the Houthis in Yemen over the Signal messaging app. The outlet’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had mistakenly been added to the chat and was privy to sensitive discussions about the details of the attack (including types of aircraft, missiles and launch times, as well as the name of a CIA operative). Goldberg’s initial article omitted parts of the group’s communications on the grounds that it could jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel, but he published the entire transcript on Wednesday after several administration members disputed his characterization of their contents. Ad-free podcasts are here!Many listeners have been asking for an ad-free version of this podcast that they could subscribe to — and we finally launched it. You can go to ReadTangle.com to sign up!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠, our “Under the Radar” story ⁠here and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.Take the survey: What do you think about the end of the ceasefire? Let us know here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast was written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Hunter Casperson, Kendall White, Bailey Saul, and Audrey Moorehead. Our logo was created by Magdalena Bokowa, Head of Partnerships and Socials.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. And welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where dead views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. It is Monday, March 31st. We are back from a week off, a week of spring break. I'm actually recording this, we'll say from an undisclosed location, not in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania right now.

I'm actually out in West Texas, down near the Southern border. And I am on a piece of property that I have down here, a little bit out in the wilderness. I was expecting to be back in Philly by now, but I came down for a week for our spring break and I couldn't really bring myself to leave quite yet. So I'm still here.

I'm recording remotely here, not the most ideal circumstances in terms of a studio. So big props to John Wall, our executive producer, who's helping make this happen. It's a really, really, really crazy time in the news. And I wasn't sure how to start this podcast today. I mean, we have a main story that we're going to cover, which is the Signal Chat controversy, which I think was the story from the last week. But it didn't feel sufficient to just jump into that.

It's cliche at this point to say that a lot can happen in a week, but a lot did happen while we were out on spring break. And I don't really know how else to really show you how much happened than just reading down the news that happened just last week. So I'm gonna start today's podcast before I hand it over to John for today's main story

by just doing that. So here is a quick flourish on a single week in March of 2025. The White House, fearing a narrow house majority after a few upcoming special elections, pulled the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik, the Republican from New York, to be UN ambassador. The administration also pulled its nomination for CDC director

and replaced him with Dr. Susan Monter as a well-respected establishment choice. The United States Agency for International Development, also known as USAID, was effectively dissolved with the entire organization reduced to just a dozen or so employees. The Department of Homeland Security also gutted its civil rights team, and Health and Human Services HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced 10,000 jobs would be cut from his department. Meanwhile, the Senate confirmed Michael Kratzos to lead the White House's Office of

Science and Technology Policy and confirmed Dr. J. Bhattacharya and Marty McCarry to National Institute of Health and FDA posts respectively. Those are two men who were in the news a lot during the COVID era. And then the top vaccine official at the FDA resigned, citing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s, quote, misinformation and lack of transparency. The administration came under intense scrutiny after a video of mass immigration officers arresting a Tufts University international graduate student on the street went viral. The allegations against the student, Rumeysa Azturk, appear to be linked to the publication of an op-ed in Tufts student newspaper in which she advocated for a ceasefire in Gaza and called on the university to divest from

Israel. You can read that op-ed with a link in today's episode description. Azturk was one of 300 students who have had their visas revoked for quote pro-Hamas activity, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Meanwhile, immigration lawyers for several people deported to El Salvador's maximum security prison have begun filing claims that their clients were not just falsely identified as gang members,

but had legally filed for asylum and did not have any criminal records or warrants. Trump also revoked the legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who were given parole during the Biden administration. Then, he signed a quickly challenged executive order seeking to overhaul U.S. elections, which included a requirement to present proof of citizenship when you vote.

Columbia University caved to Trump's demands in order to begin negotiations to regain $400 million in federal funding, and then its interim president resigned. PBS and NPR's leaders testified before Congress on federal funding support for public broadcasting and the second law firm struck a deal with Trump to provide a hundred million dollars of pro bono work in hopes of avoiding an executive order that was going to target the law firm. In other court news, the Supreme Court upheld a Biden administration regulation on ghost guns, declined to hear casino mogul Steve Wynn's challenge to a defamation lawsuit, and took up a case

about whether states can tax Catholic charities and religiously affiliated groups. The Trump administration also asked the Supreme Court to halt a judge's order to rehire probationary federal workers, and then an appeals court refused to halt the same order. An appeals court also maintained a block on Trump's sweeping federal funding freeze while a judge separately ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to reinstate fired employees,

preserve its records, and get back to work. Two law firms then sued Trump for targeting them with punitive executive orders. In Wisconsin, the race for control of the Supreme Court has hit a fever pitch with Elon Musk barnstorming the state in support of the Republican nominee. Musk offered a $1 million giveaway to attendees of a rally who had voted in the election, then canceled the prize over concerns about running a foul of state law, then relaunched the giveaway for those who had signed a petition against activist judges. Musk also surprised everyone by announcing the sale of his social media platform X

to his artificial intelligence startup XAI. Meanwhile, Democrats won a Pennsylvania State Senate seat while Republicans are going on defense in a Trump heavy district hosting a special congressional election in Florida. With all of this going on, rapid economic developments have continued. Trump announced new auto tariffs

in a major trade war escalation while egg prices fell precipitously amid a sudden drop in bird flu cases and an increase in the egg imports. Global stocks continue to slump on the threats of tariffs and Goldman Sachs put the odds of a recession at 35%. US home prices rose unexpectedly in February while consumer confidence slid to a 12-year low, all while Trump's net favorability ratings hit an all-time high and the percentage of

Americans saying the country was on the right track reached 45%, the second highest since 2009. Make that make sense to me, please. Looking ahead, the U.S. continues to push for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, though Trump is reportedly upset that Vladimir Putin appears to be dragging his feet. Four U.S. soldiers are now missing after their armored vehicles sunk in mud in exercises in Lithuania, with little in the way of an explanation. Vice President J.D. Vance traveled to Greenland and then made the case that Greenlanders should

choose independence from Denmark and embrace a military partnership with the United States to preserve their economic and military security. Israel struck the largest remaining hospital in southern Gaza during a renewed offensive, claiming Hamas was housing operatives in the building. On Saturday, Hamas accepted a new Gaza ceasefire deal from mediators in Egypt and Qatar, which would have required the release of five living hostages in exchange for aid flowing back into the Strip. Israel rejected the agreement and made a counter proposal.

Elsewhere, South Korea's Prime Minister Han Duk-Soo was reinstated as acting president after his impeachment was overturned. Sudan's army was accused of killing hundreds of children in an airstrike on a market in Darfur and a Japanese court dissolved the controversial Unification Church. And all of this, this entire incomplete list of news from the last week is to say nothing of the biggest story of them all. The story of a reporter from the Atlantic being inadvertently added to a Trump administration group chat on the messaging app Signal for coordinating strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The story burst onto the national media stage in a way very few have in the first few months of the Trump administration. Democrats are demanding investigations into the mix-up, and some Republicans are joining them. The administration spent all of last week defending itself and addressing criticisms about what had happened, and now a federal judge is ordering the administration to preserve chat logs from the conversation. So today, we thought it pertinent to give that story a tango style

breakdown with views from the left, right and then my take, even though it's now nearly a week old. After all, it's still unfolding right before our eyes. And then we'll have today's quick hits and some of our other standard sections to round out our return from break. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to John and I'll be back for my take. ["I'm Back For My Take"] Thanks, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Hope you were able to find some joyful and positive moments during this week that we were off.

It's always a little challenging to take this time and focus on things that aren't news-related, especially when so much is happening. But also as Isaac has mentioned before, it's important to take a step back and get a little space and perspective on things that are happening and come back, hopefully feeling a little bit more refreshed

and able to take on all the information that's coming at us. And thank you for those of you who tuned into our podcast offerings this week in lieu of not having the newsletter. We appreciate your continued support. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, President Donald Trump suggested that he would bomb Iran if the country's

leadership did not reach a new deal with the U.S. on its nuclear program. Number two, the Personal Consumption Expenditure Price Index, the Federal Reserve's key measure for inflation, increased 2.8% year-over-year in February and 0.4% from the previous month, both slightly higher than economists' expectations. The death toll from Friday's 7.7-magnitude earthquake in Myanmar reached 1,700, with an additional 3,400 injured and over 300 missing as of Sunday. Number 4.

Israel conducted airstrikes against what it said were Hezbollah targets in southern Beirut, the first strikes on Lebanon's capital since November. The operation followed rocket fire targeting the northern Israeli city of Kiyot Shemona on Friday. And number five, the Taliban released US citizen, Fay Hall, who had been detained by the group in February. The release followed President Trump's decision to remove multimillion dollar bounties on several senior Taliban members. As we've been reporting, Trump administration officials are defending their participation

in a group chat on a cryptid messaging app Signal about a highly sensitive operation to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen. Prior to Wednesday's hearing, the Atlantic published screenshots and a fuller text chain that were sent in the group chat. Secretary of Defense Hegseth maintains nobody has been texting war plans and has denied sharing any classified information. On Monday, March 24th,

the Atlantic published a partial transcript of communications among Trump administration officials as they discussed impending military operations against the Houthis in Yemen over the Signal Messaging app. The outlet's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had mistakenly been added to the chat and was privy to sensitive discussions about the details of the attack,

including types of aircraft, missiles, and launch times, as well as the name of a CIA operative. Goldberg's initial article omitted parts of the group's communications on the grounds that it could jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel, but he published the entire transcript on Wednesday after several administration members disputed his characterization of their contents. For context, Signal is a free messaging app that offers end-to-end encryption, a technology intended to prevent unauthorized parties from reading communication between devices as they

are transmitted. This feature has been made popular with journalists and their sources, however, the app itself can still be hacked. Goldberg reported that on March 13, National Security Advisor Michael Walz sent him a request to join a private signal group that included several high-level Trump administration figures and their staffers to discuss preparations for potential strikes against the Houthis. The group deliberated over the next two days, with an account identified as Vice President J.D. Vance expressing reservations about the attack, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

advocated for immediate action. On March 15, Hegseth said that the strikes were to begin shortly and shared information on targets, weapon systems, and attack sequencing. Roughly two hours later, the first strikes were carried out. After the story broke, Walz said that he took full responsibility for the leak but suggested that Goldberg could have added himself to the group or gained access through a technical error, claims refuted by Goldberg's reporting. Furthermore, Walz, President Donald Trump, and other administration figures have sought

to downplay the contents of the chat, arguing that no classified information was shared. Trump also reiterated his support for Waltz and Hegseth, saying on Saturday that he did not plan to fire anyone involved in the leak. Congressional leaders from both parties have called for investigations into the episode and criticized the administration's use of signal for sensitive deliberations. On Thursday, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, the Republican from Missouri, and ranking member Jack Reed, the Democrat from Rhode Island, sent a letter to the Pentagon's Inspector General asking him to investigate how Goldberg ended up in

the chat. However, Attorney General Pam Bondi signaled she was not likely to launch a criminal investigation into the incident, saying that the information shared in the group was not classified. Separately, on Thursday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to preserve its communications on Signal from March 11 to March 15. The app allows users to automatically delete messages after a set amount of time. Today, we'll share perspectives about the incident

from the right and the left, and then Isaac's take. We'll be right back after this quick break. We'll be right back after this quick break. by a true life story. If I don't deal with him, he will never leave us alone. You don't see how the words sing to you. Anna Lee Ashford and Dennis Quaid star. I am not responsible for what my dad did. This going how you hoped? Happy Face, new series now streaming exclusively on Paramount+. With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data

and dollars off with your mobile plan, you're not with Fizz. Switch today. Conditions apply, details at fizz.ca. All right, first let's start off with some agreement. Commentators on the right and the left agree, to varying degrees, that the Trump administration is at fault for the leak. Many also say that Goldberg's inclusion in the chat was a significant security lapse.

Alright, let's take a look at what the right is saying. Many on the right say that the episode reflects poorly on some members of the administration, but note the important insights it provided into their foreign policy. Some argue the story is being blown out of proportion by the left. Others worry about the leak's ramifications for America's global security standing. The Washington Examiner editorial board wrote about the Trump administration's Signal group chat leak and its consequences. The use of Signal, a commercially made end-to-end encryption application available on most mobile

devices to discuss sensitive national security matters, certainly predates the Trump administration. CIA Director John Ratcliffe also testified under oath that Signal was loaded onto his work computer and that he was briefed on the application's permissible use to discuss sensitive matters with administration colleagues, the board said. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has admitted that he built the group in question. Waltz shared information about the outcome of the attacks, including that the first target, their top missile guy, we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and now it's collapsed.

It is hard to imagine how this could not be classified information. If there's a silver lining to the release of the signal chat, it is that the discussion portrays a thoughtful, collaborative, and candid group of advisors doing their best to provide counsel to Trump. This is not an echo chamber of yes men. There is disagreement. It is expressed professionally. The disagreement is acknowledged and responded to, and the group moves on," the board wrote.

But no one outside the administration should have ever seen it. Trump was lucky that his team's sloppiness did not get anyone killed. In town hall, Ben Shapiro explored security breaches and the infamous signal chat. First, this was an obvious mistake. It was not a purposeful leak of intelligence information to our enemies, and Hegseth has claimed that it did not include names, targets, locations, unit routes, sources, methods, or other classified information. This would mean that no criminal activity occurred, Shapiro said.

Second, procedure-based scandals have gone the way of the Dodo bird. When James Comey refused to prosecute Hillary Clinton in 2016 on the basis that she had not intended to disseminate classified information, and that her negligent handling of classified information did not constitute law-breaking, he essentially wiped out all similar potential scandals in the future. This scandal is procedural in nature. It doesn't match up to the ire unleashed by some of the Trump administration's loudest critics.

One cannot help but guffaw while listening to Susan Rice, who presided over the Russian invasion of Crimea as Obama's national security advisor and then served in the Biden administration as he presided over the collapse of Afghanistan, label the signal chat the biggest national security debacle that any professional can remember, Shapiro wrote. In the end, this is what Americans will care about. Is the Trump administration steadfastly pursuing American security? In National Review, Noah Rothman said, the signal leak's fallout is serious. The text read, burns intelligence provided to the U.S. by our Israeli counterparts, which

hostile counterintelligence analysts can trace back to its sources to limit or prevent future disclosures. In the worst case, the leak exposes the human sources on the ground inside Yemen who provided information that was eventually captured by Israeli and US intelligence networks, Rothman wrote. Even more troubling is the potential that this leak will convince American allies to throttle U.S. access to their intelligence products in the legitimate fear that such candor would imperil their own sources, methods, and assets.

It is still best practice to avoid the temptation to catastrophize. The conversation that this leak exposed provided the public with some reassurance that a pretty conventional interagency process still governs U.S. military action abroad, and it shows that the elements in this administration who would dismantle America's alliance structure aren't in the driver's seat, at least for now. But the fallout from this leak continues to settle over the geopolitical landscape, and it is slowly poisoning America's relations with its allies and undermining U.S. security

in measurable ways. Alright that is it for what the right is saying which brings us to what the left is saying. The left is alarmed by the administration's handling of the incident, criticizing its refusal to accept accountability. Some call on Congress to lead a bipartisan investigation into the leak. Others say the leak revealed little about the administration that we didn't already know. In the Washington Post, Philip Bump wrote about what the lack of consequences for the

signal scandal means. It remains possible that political pressure or a latent sense of self-respect might lead to the resignation of one of those culpable for the most egregious elements of the incident — the creation of a secret conversation on a third-party transitory messaging app, Vice President J.D. Vance's suggestion that Trump wasn't fully briefed on the matter, or Hegset's boisterous delineation of where and when the strikes were to take place, Bum said. But it still seems very unlikely. Trump, and by extension his party, have proved increasingly likely to rise to the defense

of anyone seen as under fire from any perceived opponent. Without accountability, the damage here would not simply be that the U.S. government will continue to be led by people who don't know or don't care why communications about military operations occur over secure channels. It is also that there will be no public signal that the actions of these officials were bad, Bumbrute. It is bad that senior officials, including the Vice President, were in a disappearing chat that included an unauthorized participant.

It is bad that this conversation included a heads-up about forthcoming military action alongside a discussion about whether the commander-in-chief even wanted to go ahead with it. Just because the media and Democrats are noting that these things are bad does not mean that they are not bad. In MSNBC, Simone D. Sanders Townsend argued, only Congress can get to the bottom of the signal scandal. This is no ordinary offense. The conduct here raises questions about the handling of America's secrets, the safety

of our troops, and the accuracy of our public records. And the Trump administration has already shown that it cannot be trusted to police this matter itself while a Republican call for the Defense Department's Inspector General to investigate is insufficient. Only Congress can do this job," Sanders-Tanson said. It's clear this administration is hoping the colossal failure blows over and Americans move on. We, as a nation, cannot allow that to happen.

Now is not the time for lawmakers to sit idly by. At stake is whether our allies continue to trust us with their most sensitive intelligence, whether an enemy spots a covert operation before it's complete, whether a soldier makes it home to see their child grow up," Sanders-Townsend wrote. It must be Congress that leads an investigation because the uncomfortable truth is this. The administration cannot be trusted to investigate itself. Only Congress can actively pursue a full-scale investigation to answer the questions raised by this scandal.

It is up to the public to demand real accountability from their representatives." In The New Yorker, David Remnick described the greatest scandal of Signalgate. The comedy of Goldberg's reports resides, at least in part, in the discovery that the Vice President and the heads of leading defense and intelligence bureaucracies deploy emojis with the same frequency as middle schoolers, Remnick said. More seriously, but not astonishingly, when prominent members of the administration were confronted with their potentially lethal carelessness, they did as their president would have them do.

They attacked the character and the integrity of the reporter, who proved far more concerned about national security than the national security advisor, and then refused to give straight answers to Congress about their cock-up and the sensitivity of the communications. This is an administration that does not have to slip on a signal-banana peel to reveal its deepest hell prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn very little if we were privy to a 24-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance, Remnick wrote. It would be unwise to dismiss the importance of secrets in this or any other administration, but the point is that Trump and his ideological and political planners have made no secret

of their intentions. While Richard Nixon tended to save his darkest confidences and prejudices for private messages with such aides as Henry Kissinger and H.R. Haldeman, Trump gives voice to his id almost daily at the microphone or on social media. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for with the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. So every administration has a denial tree. The way in which they handle damaging stories like this, and I think how their defenses

change over time as more information comes to light is important. In this case, I think we should all take note of the Trump administration's denial tree. First, the administration attacked Goldberg, calling him a lying, sleazy journalist and implying that his reporting was not to be trusted. Then the administration claimed that no war plans or classified info were sent via signal, and that they had no idea how Goldberg infiltrated the chat, implying that he did something nefarious. Then they conceded Goldberg's story was largely true, but insisted no classified information was shared.

Then once Goldberg released the chats, they effectively admitted that battle plans were sent, but tried to distinguish them from war plans or classified information and continued to insist that they were investigating how Goldberg was added to the chat, despite the chat logs showing clearly that Mike Waltz added him. Then they criticized Goldberg for releasing the full text of the chats, which proved they were

not being honest in their initial downplaying of the materials shared in the chat. Then they invoked Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Then they were reduced to arguing that Goldberg oversold what he had because the signal chat didn't actually blow the cover of a CIA agent. In moments like this, when an administration is flooding the zone with mismanaged talking points, denials, and what aboutism, I find that people who have consistently criticized both sides are best at seeing things clearly through the mud.

Justin Amash, the former Republican representative from Michigan, posted on X that he could, quote, confidently say this information was classified at the time it was revealed to the journalists. If this had been presented to members of Congress, from Michigan posted on X that he could quote, confidently say this information was classified at the time it was revealed to the journalists. If this had been presented to members of Congress, we could not have walked out of the skiff with it. It's bizarre to pretend otherwise." End quote. Glenn Greenwald, the muck-racking journalist and frequent critic of the left asked, if Goldberg had published all of this before the Yemen bombing began,

would the Trump White House have said, no problem, it's not classified? Sagar and Jeddi, the host of the Breaking Points podcast argued that at this point, Waltz thinks MAGA and Trump are so stupid, they will believe his implication that Jeffrey Goldberg deliberately went into his phone to put his phone number in it under a different contact. It can also be helpful to look abroad. Israeli officials, for instance, were incensed about the irresponsibility of the chat because it

included sensitive intelligence Israel provided to the U.S. from a human intelligence source in Yemen. There is just no good way to spin this. Yes, the chat showed some interesting and thoughtful deliberation, at least from Vice President Vance, about the decision to carry out the strikes. But it also read a bit like a teenage group chat full of emojis and false bravado as the United States killed dozens of people, including civilians. And most importantly,

no one in a group of top military and intelligence officials noticed the journalist present or took responsibility for him being there in the first place. The most disappointing part about the entire episode is that there has been no accountability. This administration has made meritocracy a central point of its entire ethos. President Trump repeatedly and rightly criticized President Biden on the campaign trail for not firing anyone for major mistakes in his administration, like the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.

New members of the administration, like Tulsi Gabbard, have pledged up and down that they would introduce a new era of radical transparency. Then the moment they have their first public relations crisis, that all goes up in flames. Gabbard, for instance, looked and sounded like every other politician while refusing to answer questions about the chat before Congress. And then she was dishonest about what was in the chats. So much for radical transparency. Trump has opted not to fire Waltz because he doesn't want to give a scout to the Atlantic.

Hegsath, whose mantle of meritocracy was always something I was skeptical of, has completely dodged any ownership of how bad this looks. Will the administration pay for this politically? It seems unlikely. If you watch a few minutes of Fox News' coverage of the story, you get the sense that much of Trump's base won't have to grapple with seriousness of what happened. Despite my enthusiasm about what we're building here

at Tangle, the unfortunate reality is that, for the most part, our two political tribes are still living in totally different information ecosystems. Incredibly, Republicans in the Senate are still pointing to Hillary Clinton to defend themselves. It has now been 20 years since Clinton was elected to office and 10 years since her email scandal broke. Perhaps most frightening, I saw several prominent right-wing influencers insisting the entire

episode was intentional, that the Trump administration wanted the leak to happen for some yet to be seen benefit. The real truth is much simpler and perhaps more sinister. This group likely created a chat on Signal precisely to avoid transparency laws, despite warnings from our government about the vulnerability of such apps. Then they inadvertently added a journalist without anyone noticing his presence before sharing sensitive and classified information about an impending war plan, all of which put soldiers and sources at risk. They responded to the entire episode not by punishing anyone or owning the mistake, but instead by trying to smear a journalist for doing his job and then insisting to Americans they were not seeing what they were very obviously seeing.

Is this a Watergate level scandal? Of course not. But it shouldn't require history-defining misconduct to have some fire in your belly about what happened. Collectively, we should all insist on living in reality, on accountability, and on being told the truth. That's true regardless of what past or future administrations have done, and it's a standard we should apply unblinkingly to the one in power now. We'll be right back after this quick break. Now streaming. What do you know about the happy face killer? He's my father.

It's so good to see you, Missy. Experience the thrilling new series. He said he killed another woman. Inspired by a true life story. If I don't deal with him, he will never leave us alone. You don't see how the words sing to you. Annali Ashford and Dennis Quaid star. I am not responsible for what my dad did. It's going how you hoped. Happy Face, new series now streaming exclusively on Paramount+. Melt into its plush top cover. Stay comfortable with cooling gel foam.

And let supportive coils cradle you to sleep. Try Logan & Cove at home risk-free for 365 nights. And if you're a listener in Canada, we have an exclusive offer for you. Get a free bedding bundle when you buy now at loganandcove.ca slash podcast. All right. That is it for my take. We are going to skip today's reader question because the long intro at the top took up a good deal of space. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod, and we'll be back tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Thanks, Isaac.

Here's your Under the Radar section for today, folks. Last week, the biotechnology research company 23andMe, which offers users a profile of their genetic heritage based on a saliva sample, filed for bankruptcy and announced that it would seek a sale. The news has raised concerns about whether customers' personal data will be sold off as part of the sale, as the company's databases contain genetic information about millions

of users. While the bankruptcy filing won't change the company's data protection measures, many privacy experts have urged users to delete their information from 23andMe due to uncertainty about how the data could be used by whichever entity eventually buys the company. NBC News has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. Alright, next up is our numbers section. The approximate number of accounts on encrypted platforms registered to cell phone numbers

for US government workers and elected officials is 1,100, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. The approximate number of hours between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth communicating via signal that the United States was preparing to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen and the start of the strikes is two, according to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. The number of government officials in the Signal Group chat is 18. The percentage of U.S. adults who say the conduct by Trump administration officials in the Signal Group where they discussed military plans is a serious problem is 74%, according to a March 2025 YouGov poll.

The percentage of Democrats, independents, and Republicans, respectively, who think the officials' conduct is a serious problem is 89%, 72%, and 60%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say the media is making too big a deal out of the story is 22%. The percentage of U.S. adults who say the media is treating the story appropriately is 17%. And the percentage of U.S. adults who say the media is not making a big enough deal out of the story is 37%. And last but not least our Have a Nice Day story.

An increasing number of Nepali Sherpas are leaving for safer employment opportunities abroad after three Sherpas died in 2023 while working to help climbers through the most treacherous sections of Mount Everest. However, drones may prove to be a useful tool to help reduce the chances of fatal accidents and ease the burden on Sherpas. This season, specialized drones will be tested to transport loads of up to 35 pounds, removing waste and moving ladders for climbing rats in hopes of making Sherpas work faster, safer, and more efficient.

The New York Times has this story and there's a link in today's episode description. Alright everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, please go to reetangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew. This is John Law signing off.

Have a great day y'all. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by Duke Thomas. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Will Kavak, Gellysol and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was made by Magdalena Bikova, who is also our social media manager.

The music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle, please go check out our website at reedtangle.com. That's reedtangle.com. 20 years of Jonas living the dream tour performing Nick Solo and the administration Joe and DNCE and the Jonas Brothers Kevin, Nick and. Together with Marshmello and special guests, boys like girls. Playing Rogers Center, August 21st. The greatest celebration of Jonas ever. Get tickets now at LiveNation.com.

With the Fizz loyalty program, you get rewarded just for having a mobile plan. You know, for texting and stuff. And if you're not getting rewards like extra data and dollars off with your mobile plan you're not with Fizz. Switch today conditions apply details at Fizz.ca