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‘Signal-Gate’: CIA Sabotage? Or Another ‘Anonymous’ in the Trump White House?

Posted on | March 25, 2025 | 33 Comments

Tuesday evening, I watched Laura Ingraham interview National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who promised to “get to the bottom” of how a supposedly secure text-message conversation between top officials of the Trump administration “accidentally” included notorious anti-Trump Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Democrats and their media allies are trying to turn “Signal-gate” into a scandal, while Trump’s defenders are circling the wagons and denouncing Goldberg. But what we’re not getting is a plausible explanation of how this happened.

My friend Matt Margolis has kept digging away at this story, without getting any definitive answer to the big question, and what is being said by Waltz and other administration officials doesn’t help explain this. They’re defending, not explaining, and if I were Donald Trump I’d give Waltz about 72 hours to figure out who screwed the pooch, or else he would become the former National Security Adviser.

Was it a CIA setup? Matt Margolis writes:

[A]ccording to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Joe Biden first authorized the use of Signal for government communications.
This jibes with what CNN’s Scott Jennings revealed Monday night. His sources told him that Signal was preloaded on various devices when the Trump administration took over for the Biden administration.
“I did learn a few things in some of my conversations, if you’re interested,” he said. “One is that the Signal program was preloaded on a number of devices and agency computers in this circuit when they got there. So, in their view, it was already in use.”
On Tuesday, [CIA Director John] Ratcliffe confirmed that the Biden administration installed the Signal messaging app on CIA computers and approved it for work use.
“So that we’re clear, one of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at, uh, the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers,” Ratcliffe said in sworn testimony Tuesday. “Um, one of the things that I was briefed on very early, Senator, was by the CIA records management folks about—about the use of Signal as a permissible work use. It is. That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.”

OK, so if the CIA installed the app, we could imagine a scenario in which someone on the agency’s staff had a “backdoor” on the administration communications devices, and used that access to insert Jeffrey Goldberg into the Signal chat group. If that’s what happened, the CIA operative responsible needs to be identified, indicted, arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But that’s just one scenario, and it’s not even the worst-case scenario. No, far worse is the possibility that this mysterious “accident” was done by a backstabber inside Team Trump.

You remember Miles Taylor, don’t you? He was the Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who, under the byline “Anonymous,” published a 2018 New York Times article with the headline, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” A year later, “Anonymous” published a book and, shortly before the 2020 election — by which time he was actively campaigning for Joe Biden — Taylor admitted that he was “Anonymous.” So what may have been exposed by “Signal-gate” is that someone else is now going the “Anonymous” route.

This is where I find myself troubled by what Waltz said in that interview with Laura Ingraham. She raised the idea — obviously, it’s occurred to others besides me — that a staffer was responsible:

“Is someone in your intel team trying to cause trouble here? Because that’s the scuttlebutt out there.”
Waltz answered, “No. Look, this is a great group. The president has a great team. This is not first term.” . . .
Ingraham then asked, “So, you don’t know what staffer is responsible for this right now?”
Waltz answered, “Well, look, a staffer wasn’t responsible. And, look, I take full responsibility. I built the group. My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.” . . .
Ingraham followed up, “So, a staffer did not put his contact information?”
Waltz answered, “Of course not.”

Hmmm. This doesn’t add up. Waltz appears to be saying that he himself entered Jeffrey Goldberg’s number onto the message chain, even as he denies having any contact with Goldberg.

The point here is, nobody inside the White House should be communicating with Jeffrey Goldberg, ever, for any reason. So where did this number come from? Who put it into the group chat? Waltz seemed to be telling Ingraham that somehow he had gotten “spoofed,” that Goldberg had engaged in some kind of impersonation — so that Goldberg’s number showed up on Waltz’s phone under somebody else’s name, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how this could have happened. Like, you get a phony text message that says it’s from Amazon, and your package didn’t get delivered so “click here,” etc., but is the NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER going to fall for that kind of stupid hacker trick on his GOVERNMENT-ISSUED SECURE PHONE?

Anyway, the story so far doesn’t make sense. Waltz has promised to “get to the bottom of it,” and he better be pretty damned quick about it, or he’s going to be spending more time with his family, as they say.



 

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Category: Donald Trump, Scandal

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