A fireable, prosecutable offense

If it’s all true, President Trump should fire Pete Hegseth and Michael Waltz. I think they should also be prosecuted.

In a former life, I worked as a USAF contractor, embedded with the military. I was responsible for maintaining communications systems that included rudimentary email and other IT functions, both unclassified and classified. The highest priority in dealing with classified data is OPSEC—Operational Security of troops, plans, movements, and the like. I once witnessed a full bird colonel get dressed down on a secure video link by higher headquarters because he referenced the tail number of an aircraft in an unclassified email to crew families, giving the arrival time so they could be met after a long remote deployment. I had to completely sanitize an entire email system, which took all day, in order to restore it to “uncompromised” status. The U.S. military takes OPSEC seriously. Or at least, they did.

A secure, STU III encrypted telephone terminal, and a screen shot from the Signal app.

As you’ve likely read, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is accused of sharing OPSEC details of future combat plans on a smartphone app called Signal, which is used for private, encrypted group chat communications. In the group where he shared these plans, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added. Goldberg was privy to the entire conversation, without being entitled or cleared to know any of it. This, if true, is a major breach of OPSEC. Any military officer who made such a breach would almost certainly be court-martialed, since the nature of the OPSEC involved impending plans to attack certain Houthi targets in Yemen.

Now, let me preface my remarks with a caveat. What Goldberg reported may or may not constitute a violation of OPSEC. The administration is so far taking a position that there was no classified information shared. Democrats are calling for Hegseth’s resignation. The politics are balkanized. Pro-Trump pundits are calling people who believe Goldberg “Hegseth haters.” Those who don’t care for Trump are using this story as proof the administration is a clown show. I don’t care about the politics here. If you don’t like Trump, you are prone to believe anything that supports your bias. If you love Trump, you will want to support his appointees and what they are doing. So the story itself, politically, is whatever you want it to be.

What I want to deal with here, is if the story is true, in the sense that Goldberg received OPSEC—targets, units, weapons employed—in advance of the U.S. military’s attack on Houthi assets, then this is more than a political problem. It’s a very real issue within the military and our national security apparatus. If this is true, then Hegseth should not have done it, because we expect he would know better. We expect better judgement. We expect better, period.

That being said, let me deal with the allegation itself.

Goldberg was reportedly mistakenly added to the chat by Michael Waltz, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. The administration is now claiming this was done by a staffer. (Always blame the staff.) Waltz is a U.S. Army reserve officer, a colonel. He served on active duty as a Ranger, and was awarded four Bronze Star medals. He served in Congress, representing Florida’s 6th CD in the House until he was appointed to his high position. Waltz served in the Bush administration, in the Pentagon, as defense policy director, and advised then-Vice President Dick Cheney on counterterrorism. Waltz should know better.

In any sane world, he’d be court-martialed, were he on duty. In any sane world, President Trump would fire him, and his security clearance would be revoked. In any sane world, Waltz’s military career would come to a sudden and permanent end, if not followed by a term in prison. Who knows at this point, but it appears in Trump world, a staffer will be sacrificed for the sins of the boss.

President Trump should also fire Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Hegseth was also a military officer (though lower in rank than Waltz) before he went to Fox News, then to the Pentagon as its chief civilian. Hegseth knows the value of OPSEC, and how it should be protected. In any sane world, Hegseth would be up on charges.

You ask, why, Steve? Good question. Let me give a brief answer.

Classified data must be protected. OPSEC is the highest priority of classified data, since it affects planned and impending military action or the potential for that, somewhere in the world. War-fighters (as the folks on the other end of a bullet are called) are in peril if their positions, movements, or plans are exposed. It doesn’t matter if anyone can prove “the enemy” obtained the data. Exposed means compromised. Compromised operations are usually scrubbed, or at least proceed with a higher degree of risk. Operating and exposing OPSEC using systems that are not approved for classified data is, by its nature and definition, compromising that data.

The New York Times reported, based on Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic:

At 11:44 a.m. on March 15, Mr. Hegseth posted the “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Mr. Goldberg wrote. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.”

Let me explain a little about compromising data and OPSEC. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a courier has a locked pouch containing orders for deployment or weapons release on a target, that he is delivering to a particular military unit. Let’s say he stops at the 7-Eleven because he really has to relieve himself (in the toilet, from a particularly gassy burrito). Let’s say he leaves his pouch in his locked vehicle (which is unmarked), and goes to the bathroom (he is not in uniform). Except he forgets to lock the vehicle. When he returns, everything is where he left it, but he’s horrified that the car was not locked. Is this man guilty of compromising classified OPSEC? You bet he is.

It’s very possible that the courier was tailed by a foreign spy. It’s possible that while he was in the bathroom (he really should have taken the pouch with him), the foreign agent opened his car, opened the pouch, perused the contents, and returned everything exactly as it was. Other than by obtaining the 7-Eleven video (if there is any), there’s really no way to prove or know if the pouch has been compromised. But Steve, you say, doesn’t the pouch have anti-tamper controls? Yes, it likely does. But doesn’t the foreign spy know this, and likely have the ability to bypass those? We can go on all day about spy and counterspy techniques and fieldcraft, and get nowhere. In the end, if the data left the confines of the classified system (where it was under the watchful eye of the courier), it was compromised. Even if the car was locked, it would be considered compromised.

There have been cases where couriers have been pulled over for speeding or running a red light, and the officer who stopped them did not have clearance to arrest the courier, even if there was some probable cause. The security of classified data comes first, above all else.

Use of unapproved communications methods to transmit OPSEC, even to people cleared to see it, is illegal. This was the basis of the whole case against Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. That in itself was a big issue.

But, Steve, isn’t the Signal app encrypted? Yes, it is. But is it part of a classified infrastructure? Is every phone and other device that’s part of the Signal chat certified for processing classified data? Certainly, it’s not, because of how easily Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the chat. It’s not just the contents of the message that have to be protected, it’s the meta-data (recipients, security certificates, etc.). It’s the members of the group: who is authorized and who is not. And Signal is not set up to offer that level of protection. The military has systems that are set up for that level of protection, which Hegseth and Waltz certainly knew, even if Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not know (which he absolutely should know as a former U.S. Senator).

It should be a given that foreign agents regularly target the phones and other devices used by American military leaders. To think that the Signal app’s encryption is, by itself, enough to thwart efforts by our adversaries to spy on us, is foolhardy. We should assume that the entire infrastructure of that chat group used by Hegseth, Waltz and anyone else on that communication is compromised, period. We should assume that, if Jeffrey Goldberg was privy to the entire conversation, that the Chinese and Russians were as well.

Hegseth and Waltz, who know better, chose to use unapproved systems to discuss highly classified topics and share OPSEC. That’s a fireable offense. It’s a prosecutable act. Unlike President Donald Trump, neither Hegseth nor Waltz have the excuse that they can singlehandedly declassify their discussions. Even if they could, sharing future military plans, breaking OPSEC and compromising our war-fighters or intelligence officers’ lives, could be interpreted as treason, if it was intentionally done.

If the story told by Goldberg is true, and it appears to have a lot of truth to it, if Hegseth and Waltz are not disciplined—at minimum, fired—the entire military community’s trust of them and the civilian oversight that flows right up to their Commander-in-Chief, is degraded. If Trump wants that kind of relationship with his military, by all means, he should leave Hegseth and Waltz in their positions. But he should be prepared when the military doesn’t exhibit the blind obedience he requires, since the people on the other end of bullets don’t trust that the suit-wearing folks with smartphones aren’t leaking their operational plans.

If the story has any truth to it, there should be accountability, not excuses, deflections, or political chicanery calling out “the media” and The Atlantic as enemies. There must be action. If true, I don’t think there’s any good choice other than Hegseth and Waltz leaving their positions.

The window of opportunity to act is limited. Trump, though he acted surprised, now knows exactly what happened. The week should not end without Hegseth and Waltz’s resignations in hand, if not a grand jury to examine the case.

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