MSNBC’s Chris Hayes kicked off Tuesday’s episode of “All In” with some commentary over the Trump administration’s breach of apparently classified military plans. While he mainly summed up the matter for people who might have missed it, he also expressed considerable disbelief that it happened at all.
It’s “sheer, unfettered, Olympian incompetence,” Hayes said.
“The Trump White House has been caught in the worst, most embarrassing, most dangerous security breach of our lifetime. The details, I’m sure you’ve heard some of them, are almost too ridiculous to be true,” he said at the start. “Trump’s cabinet accidentally texted war plans, like imminent details, to the editor-in-chief of one of America’s most prominent magazines. This was not an anonymous leak or a hack by a foreign adversary, but rather an act of sheer, unfettered, Olympian incompetence.”
“Members of Trump’s cabinet, including the secretary of defense and the vice president, all hopped on a group chat on Signal — it’s a commercial encrypted messaging platform anyone can download from the App Store — to discuss detailed, clearly classified plans about the military strike in Yemen,” Hayes continued. “Trump’s national security advisor accidentally included, why we still don’t know, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, on the text chain.”
Hayes also discussed how one of the people on the chain appears to have literally been in Moscow at the time the text chain started, “which adds an entire new layer of just insane security concerns, as does the fact that as a former White House official told Politico, many of the participants in the conversation were likely using their personal cell phones, since generally that encrypted text app, Signal, is not allowed on government devices [because] quote, ‘Their personal phones are all hackable.’ Yeah, no kidding.”
“And it’s highly likely that foreign intelligence services are sitting on their phones, watching them type the s–t out before a White House official warned, of course, that is apparently of little consequence to Trump’s cabinet. They are group texting classified stuff because it defies the rules, because no one can hold them accountable, because they’re a bunch of incompetents, because they want to avoid the Freedom of Information Act requests,” Hayes explained.
“They want to avoid the prying eyes of responsible federal officials. Remember what happened when Trump called Zelenskyy in his first term? Right?” Hayes said, referring to when Trump attempted to extort Ukraine in order to get them to back false claims Joe Biden was involved in illegal deals there. This resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. “They want to avoid Inspector General reports. Right? They’re hiding it from others, just not foreign adversaries.”
There’s more, and you can watch the segment below:
