Why can’t Trump and his people keep our secrets?

Waltz uses third-party texting app at Cabinet meeting: Reuters/404 Media

Perhaps it’s what we could call the Mar a Lago effect – The first time he was president, Trump authorized the wholesale removal to his Palm Beach lair of top-secret material he had hoarded in the White House, seemingly giving permission to lesser Trumpazoids to engage in the same behavior in his second term in office. It didn’t help that a conspiracy between a half-wit judge in Florida and the half-wit Chief Justice of the Supreme Court rubber-stamped Trump’s violations of the espionage act, first by dismissing the charges against him at the District Court level, and then by gifting him carte blanche immunity for anything he decided to do both as president and after leaving office, so long as his dastardly deeds could be termed “official acts.”

Stealing secrets that belong to the United States government wasn’t the worst thing Trump did as president – there was the matter of his attempt to steal an election as well – but it was seen by legal and national security experts alike as his most egregious violation not only of the law of the land but also of what had heretofore been seen as one of the most gravely important norms of presidential behavior, that of insuring the nation’s security by keeping its secrets.

The frenzied first 100 days of Trump’s new adventures in office have consigned his violations of the nation’s secrecy laws to the Great Trumpian Memory Hole, where all things outrageous about the man seem to have come to rest. This is a grave mistake. We still don’t know the full extent of what secrets Trump spirited out of the White House in 2021. We know that he removed boxes that were used to store the top-secret materials in Mar a Lago when he left Florida for his New Jersey golf resort in May of 2022. We also know that the FBI never sought or executed a search warrant on Trump’s Bedminster golf club and residence, though we have learned that he was seen there waving around a plan to attack Iran in front of a writer working on a memoir being prepared by one of Trump’s chiefs of staff, Mark Meadows.

With all the concentration on national security information and secrets kept on paper, of the sort seized by the FBI from Mar a Lago, we do not know what secrets Trump may have squirreled away that had been stored in digital form on discs or thumb drives that were of course much more easily concealed than boxes of papers. And we’ll never know what secrets Trump may have passed verbally to his pal Vladimir Putin during his private meeting in Helsinki – from which even Trump’s official translator was excluded – and during phone calls between the two men after Trump left office and since he returned to the White House in January of this year.

This is Trump’s legacy in keeping the nation’s secrets: he didn’t. He stole them, and by the evidence we have seen from his public behavior and what is known about what he has done privately, he spread with abandon the nation’s secrets he was charged with keeping.

Since taking office this year, everything we know about the behavior of his minions indicates that they are going about their jobs by following Trump’s example. That’s what the whole Signalgate thing was ultimately about. The Pentagon and White House and the office of the Director of National Intelligence are outfitted with secure forms of electronic communication by text and voice both, as well as a system of Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF), rooms which are protected from intrusion by every form of spying known to man. And yet none of the official channels of top-secret communication were used by the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser, the Director of National Security, and all the other Trump officials who were included in not just one but three Signal chats about the secret attacks by the U.S. military on Houthi targets in Yemen.

This week we learned that despite being roundly criticized for his use of the Signal app to share highly sensitive information about Yemen, while he was still National Security Adviser earlier in the week, Mike Waltz was seen at the cabinet meeting in the White House apparently using the Signal app on his phone to send and receive messages from Vice President Vance, Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Today, the tech website 404 Media reported that Waltz wasn’t actually using the Signal app. He was instead texting with his fellow national security figures using a third-party app that piggy-backs on Signal to enable the user to archive chats as the law requires all federal officials to do. 404 Media reports that while Signal’s encryption protocols are considered by experts to be extremely secure, once a text leaves the Signal app to be repeated through a third-party app, its encryption is insecure. Additionally, when you send a text via Signal from your phone to the phone of another individual using Signal, that specific text is encrypted, but hostile actors could hack your phone or the phone of your text recipient and access your texts as you recorded them in unencrypted form on your phone, and as they were decrypted on the recipient’s phone.

Suffice to say none of the texts sent using Signal by Waltz or Rubio or Hegseth or Gabbard or any of the other Trump officials and private citizens like Hegseth’s wife were truly secure as they would have been had they been sent through official secure Pentagon and White House channels.

If you are a clerk down in a company in an Army unit and part of your job is to type up the “Morning Report,” the document which records who is present for duty and who is absent on any given day, you must have a secret security clearance, because Morning Reports reflect on a unit-by-unit basis the military’s so-called “readiness,” its capability on any given day to be called into action to respond to threats to the nation.

Hegseth yaps continually about concentrating on our military’s “war-fighting” capability. A Morning Report is a daily compilation of “war-fighting” readiness in its record of who is ready for duty and who isn’t. A Morning Report is thus a national security secret. If a clerk were to lose a Morning Report or give it to someone not authorized to see it, he or she would be court martialed. That is how serious the military considers a thing as simple as recording who is present for duty and who isn’t.

The question is, what in the unholy hell is going on with Trump’s people at the top of the secrecy food chain – Hegseth and Waltz and the rest of them? Is their disregard of and disrespect for information security simply reflective of their boss, or is it something else? Have they not been schooled in what security is and why it's important? Do they just not give a shit about the security of our soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines? Do they even know what a secret is?

Hegseth sure as hell does. His record of adulterous behavior, not to mention the allegation of sexual assault he has faced, indicate his familiarity with the necessity of keeping secret at least some things in life.

Secrets, especially national security secrets, are not a game. This country has adversaries: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran come immediately to mind. Each of those countries has tens of thousands of people working full time to penetrate the security that protects our nation’s secrets.

As long as Donald Trump is in the Oval Office and his clown show of a cabinet is sitting around texting each other on their personal cell phones using who-knows-what apps they downloaded from who-knows-where, U.S. national security secrets are no longer safe, and we are our own worst enemy.