The basic details of the scandal are almost impossible to defend. The White House’s national security team chatted in a Signal group about the sensitive operational details of a military strike in Yemen — potentially in violation of some federal laws — and they accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, in their online conversation.
Even the most adept political spin doctors would struggle to craft talking points on this. We are, after all, talking about the generation’s most scandalous White House security breach.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump’s operation can’t simply remain silent in response to the controversy, and the White House needed some kind of defense. So, on Day 3 of the “Signalgate” debacle, the administration settled on, and leaned into, a hyper-specific semantics argument: The Signal group chat did not include literal “war plans.” As The New York Times summarized:
The White House effort to defend Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday leaned heavily into a semantic argument. What he posted on the now-infamous Signal chat with his national security colleagues, Mr. Hegseth and other administration officials insist, was not a ‘war plan.’
To an almost cartoonish degree, many of Team Trump’s most prominent — and in this instance, most relevant — voices have simultaneously pushed the same line. The leaked chat did not include “war plans,” Hegseth told reporters. White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added via social media, “NO WAR PLANS.”
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote online, “[T]hese were NOT ‘war plans,’” and added during a White House briefing that an unidentified “they” are “playing word games.”
Clearly, someone is playing word games, but I’m not sure I’d be so quick to blame “them.”
This doesn’t have to be complicated. Senior members of the White House’s national security team used an unclassified app to discuss precise operational details about a military operation. The online chat included highly sensitive information about times and targets. The whole point was to discuss the of the U.S. military launching an attack on a foreign adversary.
“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package),” Hegseth told his colleagues in the chat. “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).” At one point, the beleaguered Pentagon chief also wrote, “THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP.”
Whether one is inclined to describe this as “war plan,” an “attack plan” or a detailed “battle plan” for a deadly military operation, at issue is a distinction without a difference.
The fact that this is apparently the one talking point the White House is clinging to is emblematic of the scandal’s seriousness and the challenges Republicans are facing to downplay its importance.
