By now, we all know that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and 18 other officials — well, 17 other officials and one journalist — participated in a highly classified discussion about an attack against Yemen’s Houthi rebels on Signal, a commercial messaging app. 

But the big story here isn’t the mistake itself. It’s the administration’s panicked reaction to having made a mistake. When things like this happen, the mature response is to take responsibility and get the facts out — lying will only make things worse, and your experience and expertise should far outweigh the error you made. 

That’s not what’s happening. Instead, everyone involved has been engaged in a public meltdown ever since the story broke.

Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, was the one responsible for using Signal to start the chat and for adding Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief at The Atlantic. But the use of this app to share classified information was the least of his problems, at least in MAGA world. As far as Waltz is concerned, the big security breach here is everyone finding out that he has Goldberg’s contact info on his phone. Waltz even took the time to call Goldberg a “bottom scum journalist” on Laura Ingram’s FOX show, and to suggest that Goldberg had somehow hacked his phone.

Some people, like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, decided to just deny reality. During her congressional testimony on Wednesday, she asserted repeatedly that “there was no classified material that was shared” in the chat.

Here’s one example of the information that Hegseth shared on Signal describing when and how the attack on the Houthis would take place: “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME) — also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s).”

That sounds pretty classified to me. 

Hegseth apparently thought his best defense was a hysterical attack on Goldberg, calling him “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of pedaling hoaxes time and time again … this is the guy that pedals in garbage.”

Putting aside whether his claims are true (they’re not), this is a bizarre way for Hegseth to defend himself against verified claims that he used an unsecure app to share highly sensitive, classified information. Not only did Goldberg have the receipts in the form of screenshots, but even the White House had already admitted that the conversation was genuine.  

This goes double since the Pentagon — the organization that Hegseth is supposed to be running — issued an OPSEC Special Bulletin warning employees that Signal is subject to hacking and reminding them that using it to share this kind of information is forbidden. 
 
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense has been even more unhinged. In her press conference on Wednesday, she claimed that no classified material was in the chat — something we can all see is simply false. Her big argument, though, was that Goldberg admitted he lied when he claimed that the chat discussed “war plans” because the headline over the Atlantic story that published screenshots of the chat referred to “attack plans.”  

Things went downhill from there. At one point Leavitt admonished, “We are not going to be lectured about national security … by Democrats and the mainstream media who turned the other cheek when the Biden administration because of their incompetence left service members dead in Afghanistan.” She went on to ask, “Do you trust the secretary of Defense … or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg, who is a registered Democrat and an anti-Trump sensationalist reporter?”

We don’t have to trust Goldberg — we can read the chat for ourselves.

Every member of President Trump’s inner circle has been selected for loyalty rather than competence or experience. They are panicking now because they know they are amateurs completely out of their depth, and that they are making it up as they go along.

There were 18 Trump appointees, including the most powerful national security officials in the government, on that group chat, and not one of them had the presence of mind to point out that they should not be having such a conversation on a private messaging app. This is one of the most flagrant security breaches in American history.

We happen to know about this national security failure because of a fluke. How many other, equally amateurish, security breaches are taking place?  

We’ll never know, but I’m sure that Russia and China do. And because of the administration’s inability to admit there is a problem, nothing will be done to fix it. That’s the real scandal here. 

Chris Truax is an appellate attorney who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s primary campaign in 2008.