Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.
Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.
Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.
Now that we have the messages, please go compare what it's in it to the CENTCOM classification guide provisions below. This all very clearly classified at at least the SECRET level.
Jeffrey Goldberg followed up on yesterday's bombshell with more receipts, and well, yes, The chat itself is sketchy, Mike Waltz added Goldberg to the chat himself, the information Pete Hegseth shared with the group is what you might call "born classified" secret or top secret-level intelligence because it includes what weapons and what times, and yes, they were probably avoiding presidential record-keeping by having the chat set to disappear after a week and yes, cabinet member lied under oath about what happened, and while we are at it, a whole apartment building seems to have been leveled to get to one guy, which feel very war-crime-y.
White House officials want to play semantic games but this is just what we're looking at--what they actually said, what statues and policy actually say. And who the journalist was or his political affiliation does not change those bare facts.
Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed for Director of National Intelligence and sworn in and we're just going to see about that, aren't we?
Does it sound like I have issues with this? Well, yeah. I was a little surprised that Sen. McConnell was the only Republican who voted against her, but it seems that the Senate GOP have decided that they aren't picking these fights with Trump and are just going to let him have what he wants. I do not think they are being honest with themselves about what he wants or what the results will be of giving it to him.
The position of DNI was created in response to intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. The point of the office was to coordinate our various intelligence agencies and correlate the information into more cohesive overviews. But intelligence is only as useful as the people looking at the products.
And I simply don't have faith in Tulsi Gabbard's judgment.
I was expanding a little on the idea that Trump is very old, actually, and manifestly not as competent as he was even during his incompetent first term. So, what the hell would be left to re-elect? When I got up the next morning, I realized how ill-conceived that idea might be. Trumpism is juche. It is revolutionary and divorced from typical Republicanism and seeks independence from reliance on other nations by just like, taking whatever it is they have we rely on. You know, capitalist juche. No allies, just a little bit of taking hints from Russia and China. And constant propaganda.
It wouldn't matter if Trump's mentis was compost. The GOP has gotten used to ignoring that Trump is, in fact an idiot. Only a really bad fuck up might save us.
The problem is--how bad? And tonight, the GOP confirmed Pete Hegseth, a white knuckle black out drunk and possible rapist and spousal abuser, with nowhere near the experience he ought to have, for Secretary of Defense.
Because what could go wrong? What have we got to lose?
There's nothing like starting your damn dumb day out knowing you are going to have to post about your fucking Moby Dickless white supremacist whale, but when I cracked open yon internets this morn to finally unload about the weekend's vote-a-rama and how it demonstrates Republican fecklessness, I already knew I was committed to talking later about how the Trump presidency has gone down the toilet. Literally.
I mean, astounding for a value of being shocked when a chronic liar somehow does something the exact opposite of what he claims he finds important.
What might get lost here is that today, the anniversary of Nixon's resignation announcement, Paul Manafort had admitted that yeah, he did give Trump Campaign polling data to someone he wants to pretend he didn't know full well was connected to GRU because why not? I mean, thanks, we have several volumes of Senate Intelligence Committee data on the various connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, but it's nice someone wants to skirt about copping to it in order to secret-boast about it. He's literally humble-bragging he does coups, you guys. Do you need an election fixer? Manafort is out here putting out feelers. He is broke and in need of the only work he knows-fuckery. Kilimnik, you guys, goes back to Ukraine shit, too. It all does. Russia was always going to fuxxor Ukraine in Trump's second term, but they are fucked because they tried it in Joe Biden's first.
I really wish MAGA so-called patriots tried to suss out where in their Daddy fixations they decided Trump or Putin were real men. They are baby-nard projectionists.
Anyway, today we also got a glimpse of what an anti-democratic, pro-Nazi shit Trump is with respect to his relationship with the military and entire misunderstanding of the history of American service, which includes thinking Nazi generals were al loyal and this was somehow great (ok, Operation Valkyrie, and also, this dope heard of the idea of the "good Nazi" and thought it was a compliment?) and also there was a confirmation of Adam Serwer's most salient observation of the Trump presidency--that the cruelty was the point. We also learned Trump didn't want disabled vets at his military pride parade because he thought it would look bad.
He thought heroes who showed physical valor in the line of duty was a problem, you guys. That their physical ordeal wasn't a visible reflection of sacrifice to a higher cause.
So how would I be shocked if Mar-a-lago was "raided"? (For a value of "raided" that means subject to a lawfully executed warrant based on probable cause because of due process.) This former president took 15 boxes of apparently classified shit out from the White House with him.
We're supposed to give a shit that MAGAs are mad about it. Of course they are. They are conditioned to be mad because of a steady diet of mad-fuel. They believe a free and fair election was stolen with no proof at all--of course they are mad about their little God King. They literally don't know what due process is or appreciate that Trump is not inviolate but is still just a citizen subject to the same laws as anybody else.
Literally any day could be the day when MAGAs decide to explode. They did on 1/6. It looks like for some reason some /Donald peeps thought 8/8 was some kind of big deal. (88 stands for Heil Hitler in some Nazi iconography.) Who cares? Democracy isn't about the feelings of losers and bigots.
And justice isn't about politics either. Sometimes, your boy is just guilty as fuck and you need to acknowledge it. The GOP is having problems with the basic idea of right and wrong. But the pursuit of the evidence and the facts matters.
My opinion of the people currently in charge of the US is not actually very good. I think I've made my estimation of Donald Trump pretty clear, and am heartened to know that many people have made the Donald J. Coyote/Wile E. Trump connection that I did the other day. On one hand, it's nice that I am not alone in thinking that the POTUS resembles a cartoon of a perennially ineffectual schemer who doesn't ever achieve his goals. On the other hand, we appear to have a president who is a cartoon of a perennially ineffectual schemer who doesn't ever achieve his goals.
Retired General Jim "Mad Dog" (although he doesn't actually even like that nickname?) Mattis served his country for a good long while and sort of had a bug about Iran that made Obama accelerate his departure at Centcom. But he was actually sort of good for a Trump Administration pick. He even resigned with a kind of decency and generosity--although his resignation didn't offer any compliment for the CINC he served, he nonetheless offered to retain continuity by working in his office through to February 28, to give the President reasonable time to find a replacement.
Alas, Trump watched enough tv this week to figure out the hidden disses of his foreign policy that were lodged deep within the hidden recesses of the Mattis resignation letter, that might have been unlocked by anyone with a fifth grade reading level. Incensed, he directed his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to do the actual dirty business of telling Mattis to box up his shit and git. That is apparently the way he rolls.
In other news, the US envoy who was overseeing the diplomatic efforts regarding the war against Daesh, Brett McGurk, accelerated his own departure in response to Trump's precipitous decision to withdraw from Syria, and to mark this occasion, Trump saw fit to "neg" him.
When, really, Trump should have known who this was and probably consulted with this guy before deciding on a withdrawal during a phone call with Turkish president Recip Erdogan, because even Erdogan was kind of freaked out about how quickly Trump wanted to let him go and most likely attack Kurds, or whatever. (See BBBB for his thoughts on how we are screwing over what should be our great allies once again.)
It's stupid that Trump said that he did not know his top guy doing State shit in a key area of the Middle East, but it's also stupid that his Acting Chief of Staff has to try and explain why Trump doesn't know him:
And it's because Trump doesn't "follow this topic". Which is actually seriously infuriating, because Daesh is a kind of big deal, and one Trump promised he had a very special secret plan for. Of course that was obviously a lie, but it's disgusting he doesn't cover up his failure to perform even the minimum of following through on his lie even the least bit.
In the meanwhile, everyone might have noticed that the DOW and Nasdaq and all that have not been doing the greatest, and probably chalked that up to the economic uncertainty caused by the trade war and the shutdown and so on. But in an alarming aside, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been phoning the heads of different banks to just check in and make sure they are liquid, NOT THAT THIS IS A CRISIS OR ANYTHING, and saw fit to broadcast those conversations over social media which is very normal and not at all likely to cause anything like AN ENTIRE FUCKING PANIC. Not that we would know if there was any reason at all he should FEEL THIS WAY given that the Trump Administration has no grown ups.
He was unqualified to begin with, and is proving to be an unqualified disaster. My disdain for those who can still support or even stomach his reign of error only grows.
There's President Donald Trump, signing an executive order to, despite his happy-talk about the circumstances, re-open the market to insurance companies to offer plans that are low-cost, but offer basically nothing of any utility whatsoever. He also decided the time was right for the federal government to stop paying subsidies to insurance companies to pay for plans to low-income people, even though those plans still, by law, need to be subsidized. His reasoning is that the insurance companies are benefitting from this incredible largesse from the government (as if no services were provided, such as managing payments for health care), but his rationale for health care deregulation is that health insurance companies were being squeezed by the vise placed on the market.
It's pretty incoherent, right? NV Gov. Sandoval makes a great point--Trump's ACA changes are sabotage and hurt everybody. What Trump is doing costs low income and working class families more because their premiums will go up, and even for people who get their plans through their employer, their contributions will surely go up. The insurance companies get less, but still and all, the government is still paying more.
But this is just Trump following through on his election promises to undo Obamacare. He didn't promise to make anything better, and he definitely isn't going to. But it's a promise fulfilled, right? And since Congress can't, won't, and don't know how? Hah! He is teaching the GOP leadership how it gets done--executive privilege. In your face, pretend Republican-leadership!
Now, you could counter that Trump is, in the photo-op he tried to make, almost walking out the door without signing. Problem? Nope. He wants that applause that he nearly exited to. He doesn't care how he gets it. But if he has to sign--also awesome. He doesn't realize that his name is now all over how Obamacare dies. This is Trumpcare now. Or "Trump Doesn't Care". Anyway--he doesn't. Surprise!
We also were made aware this week that some of the national security "old hands" were trying out a plan in case Trump wanted to go for "the football"--that is to say, in case he wanted to start a nuclear war. Sure. Why wouldn't that be norm...no. We cannot call this normal.
Trump also this week threatened the licenses of news organizations who might have spilled a story that he wanted to increase the nuclear arsenal tenfold. Which I can totally see him doing. Both the 10X nukes thing and the outlawing news thing. Because he does not get the Constitution and of course the First Amendment thereof, and also he sort of thinks that the president with the most toys, wins.
No wonder Steve Bannon says there's only a 30% chance of Trump completing this term in office. He is really bad at all of this. And I didn't even get into Iran--which is my next post for sure.
Josh Marshall points out that naming a doctrine after oneself isn't actually the done thing, but I think it would be also fitting to say that naming a short list of buzz words a "doctrine" is also going a bit far. Sarah Palin could fit it on her palm. Rick Perry could probably remember it all by himself.
What I think is interesting is that it actually is a way of putting the "three legs" of the "conservative stool" in one convenient place: 1) the defense hawks, 2) the deficit hawks, and 3) the values voters. Rubio's doctrine is simple: he's a conservative.
From my humble-blogger perspective, it kind of looks to me like results had nothing to do with the opposition to Hagel. It was a drill with blanks in the chamber. We've got a group of people (Republicans) who will oppose anything the president supports because they feel obligated to by their intended audience. Their intended audience is neither as big as they think it is, nor as influential as they hope it is. If it were either of those things, would Obama have won re-election? (I think I would like to assign that particular essay to Jen Rubin of the Washington Post, if I could.)
(This is why I don't really feel like the sequester is a thing that's going to go through either, close as we're going to cut it. Because of Big Business, state governments, and a good handful of House Reps figuring out who is actually getting the blame. Reality has to intrude. This is probably the one I'll be wrong about, but still. Something will give.)
McCain comes off like such a pissybritches, here, and I think does a real disservice to a conversation we're overdue in having and that these two veterans could have actually had if McCain didn't want to distill it down to a "yes or no" question. They do have a difference of opinion, as McCain allows, regarding the whole necessity of war, let alone the strategy of it; but he is just being simplistic by wanting to attribute all the success (for a value of success that doesn't equal "all hell breaking loose") of the surge to Petreaus. Me--I've been a long-term surge skeptic myself, and to the extent that McCain can make the claim that history has already decided--
Well, history has already happened. We can't undo the surge or know how the war in Iraq would have necessarily proceeded without the surge--for certain. History happened another way. We can't undo the Afghanistan surge, either. What we can do is question what the goals of the surge strategy was in those respective theaters, and what was accomplished versus what was lost in reality against what our expectation could have been if played out another way.
I don't think Sen. McCain allowed for that level of introspection, although I do think Hagel had thought his position through. It's just very hard to articulate that kind of thought when given a question that is so limited, and with the attitude of a foregone conclusion. My thinking is that Hagel's attitude toward war would be less costly in human lives and treasure than McCain's "bomb bomb Iran (okay, everybody)" p.o.v. But I know I don't think McCain is credible on foreign policy matters anymore, period. I extend more credit to Hagel on the basis of not having been proved wrong a lot. I might not be wholly invested in Hagel's confirmation, but I think it is interesting that we are seeing another hearing where the hardcore GOP questioners kind of are making themselves look a bit like contrary assholes.
That level of spending is stupid and won't "keep us safe" in the way that having people in charge who know what the hell they are doing will.
Romney does not know what he's talking about. He thinks if you throw money at the defense budget and simply offer "no apologies", other countries and groups will think we're just badass and leave us alone. You know who spent a lot on Cold War spending and talked tough? GOP patron saint Ronnie Raygun, and Poppy Bush, ex-CIA chief, was a tough-talking son of a gun, too. So how about those attacks upon our diplomatic stations abroad?
Right. Even during the GWOT, we didn't experience the same siege like we saw under Reagan and Bush. The answer has always been to do intelligence better--smarter, not pre-emptively or precipitously. Just, get smart.
With respect to Romney's bizarre idea that Russia is our greatest geopolitical threat (recalling the Cold War)--um, no. He's not even going to throw money at real problems.
This is a conservative? This is a businessman who knows where to invest? Bullshit. This is a guy who got told to pimp neoconservatism if he wanted to win the GOP base. Otherwise, he has nothin'. He'd rather be president than be right.
