Monday’s astounding story that the most senior members of President Donald Trump’s administration planned military strikes on Yemen over an unsecure commercial messaging app, on which they had included national security reporter and editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, has escalated over the past two days.

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth looked directly at a reporter’s camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” Throughout the day Tuesday, the administration doubled down on this assertion, apparently convinced that Goldberg would not release the information they knew he had. They tried to spin the story by attacking Goldberg, suggesting he had somehow hacked into the conversation, although the app itself tracked that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz had added him.

Various administration figures, including Trump, insisted that the chat contained nothing classified. At a scheduled hearing yesterday before the Senate Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats, during which senators took the opportunity to dig into the Signal scandal, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said: “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.” Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe agreed: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.” In the afternoon, Trump told reporters: “The attack was totally successful. It was, I guess, from what I understand, took place during. And it wasn’t classified information. So this was not classified.”

After Gabbard said she would defer to the secretary of defense and the National Security Council about what information should have been classified, Senator Angus King (I-ME) seemed taken aback. “You’re the head of the intelligence community. You’re supposed to know about classifications,” he pointed out. He continued, “So your testimony very clearly today is that nothing was in that set of texts that were classified.... If that’s the case, please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion. It’s hard for me to believe that targets and timing and weapons would not have been classified.”

Meanwhile, reporters were also digging into the story. James LaPorta of CBS News reported that an internal bulletin from the National Security Agency warned staff in February 2025 not to use Signal for sensitive information, citing concerns that the app was vulnerable to Russian hackers. A former White House official told Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel of Politico, “Their personal phones are all hackable, and it’s highly likely that foreign intelligence services are sitting on their phones watching them type the sh*t out."

Tuesday night, American Oversight, a nonprofit organization focusing on government transparency, filed a lawsuit against Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio—all of whom were also on the Signal chain—and the National Archives for violating the Federal Records Act, and suggested the administration has made other attempts to get around the law. It notes that the law requires the preservation of federal records.

Today it all got worse.

It turned out that administration officials’ conviction that Goldberg wouldn’t publicly release receipts was wrong. This morning, Goldberg and Shane Harris, who had worked together on the initial story, wrote: “The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.”

The Atlantic published screenshots of the message chat.

The screenshots make clear that administration officials insisting that there was nothing classified on the chat were lying. Hegseth uploaded the precise details of the attack before it happened, leaving American military personnel vulnerable. The evidence is damning.

The fury of Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), an Army pilot who was nearly killed in Iraq, was palpable. “Pete Hegseth is a f*cking liar,” she wrote. “This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.” Legal analyst Barb McQuade pointed out that it didn't even matter if the information was classified: it is “a crime to remove national defense information from its proper place through gross negligence…. Signal chat is not a proper place.”

The screenshots also raise a number of other issues. They made it clear that administration officials have been using Signal for other conversations: Waltz at one point typed: “As we stated in the first PC….” Using a nongovernment system is likely an attempt to get around the laws that require the preservation of public records. The screenshots also show that Signal was set to erase the messages on the chat after 4 weeks.

The messages reveal that President Trump was not part of the discussion of whether to make the airstrikes, a deeply troubling revelation that raises the question of who is in charge at the White House. As the conversation about whether to attack took place, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote about Trump’s reasoning that attacking the Houthis in Yemen would “send a message”: “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.” Later, he texted to Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again. Let’s just make sure our messaging is tight here. And if there are things we can do upfront to minimize risk to Saudi oil facilities we should do it.”

Hegseth responded: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”

The decision to make the strikes then appears to have been made by deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who ended the discussion simply by invoking the president: “As I heard it,” he wrote, “the president was clear: green light, but we soon make it clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement.” If Europe doesn’t cover the cost of the attack, “then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

“Agree,” Hegseth messaged, and the attack was on.

Also missing from the group message was the person who is currently acting as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Christopher Grady. In February, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., who took on the position in 2023 having served more than 3,000 hours as a fighter pilot, including 130 hours in combat, and commanded the Pacific Air Forces, which provides air power for U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region; the U.S. Air Forces Central Command, responsible for protecting U.S. security interests in Africa through the Persian Gulf; the 31st Fighter Wing, covering the southern region of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the 8th Fighter Wing, covering southeast Asia; U.S. Air Force Weapons School for advanced training in weapons and tactics for officers; and 78th Fighter Squadron.

Hegseth publicly suggested that Brown had been appointed because he is Black. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt,” Hegseth wrote. With Trump’s controversial replacement for Brown still unconfirmed, Admiral Grady, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, is fulfilling the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But he was not in the chat. The Pentagon's highest-ranking officer would normally be included in planning a military operation.

Also in the chat, participants made embarrassing attacks on our allies and celebrated civilian deaths in Yemen in the quest to kill a targeted combatant.

Attempts to defend themselves from the scandal only dug administration officials in deeper. On Monday night, independent journalist Olga Lautman, who studies Russia, noted that Trump’s Russia and Ukraine specialist Steve Witkoff had actually been in Russia when Waltz added him to the chat, underscoring the chat’s vulnerability to hackers. By Tuesday, multiple outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, picked up Lautman’s story.

Witkoff fought back against the Wall Street Journal story with a long social media post about how he had traveled to Moscow with a secure government phone and now it was not until he got home that he had “access to my personal devices” to participate in the Signal conversation, thus apparently confirming that he was discussing classified information with the nation’s top officials on an unsecure personal device.

Tonight, news of other ways in which the administration is compromised surfaced. The German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed that the contact information for a number of the same officials who were on the Signal chat is available online, as well as email addresses and some passwords for their private accounts, making it easy for hackers to get into their personal devices. Those compromised included National Security Advisor Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Hegseth. Wired reported that Waltz, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and Walker Barrett of the National Security Council, who was also on the Signal messaging chain, had left their Venmo accounts public, demonstrating what national security experts described as reckless behavior.

In the New York Times tonight, foreign affairs journalist Noah Shachtman looked not just at the Signal scandal but also at the administration’s lowering of U.S. guard against foreign influence operations, installation of billionaire Elon Musk’s satellite internet terminals at the White House, and diversion of personnel from national security to Trump’s pet projects, and advised hostile nations to “savor this moment. It’s never been easier to steal secrets from the United States government. Can you even call it stealing when it’s this simple? The Trump administration has unlocked the vault doors, fired half of the security guards and asked the rest to roll pennies. Walk right in. Take what you want. This is the golden age.”

Trump today did not seem on top of the story when he told reporters: “I think it’s a witch hunt. I wasn’t involved with it, I wasn’t there, but I can tell you the result is unbelievable.” When asked if he still believed there was no classified information shared, he answered: “Well, that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know, I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask the various people involved. I really don’t know.” He said the breach was Waltz’s fault—“it had nothing to do with anyone else”—and when reporters asked about the future of Defense Secretary Hegseth, who uploaded the attack plans into the unsecure system, he answered: “Hegseth is doing a great job, he had nothing to do with this…. How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it. Look, look, it’s all a witch hunt. I don’t know that Signal works. I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you….”

The administration appears to be trying to create a distraction from the damning story. Yesterday evening, Trump signed an executive order that would, if it could be enforced, dramatically change U.S. elections and take the vote away from tens of millions of Americans. But, as Marc Elias of Democracy Docket put it, the order is “confused, rhetorical and—in places—nonsensical. It asserts facts that are not true and claims authority he does not possess. It is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Rather, it is the empty threat of a weak man desperate to appear strong.”

After today’s revelations, Trump announced new 25% tariffs on imported cars and car parts including those from Canada and Mexico, despite a deal worked out earlier this month that items covered under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement Trump signed in his first term would not face a new tariff levy. The 25% tariff is a major change that will raise prices across the board and hit the automotive sector in which more than a million Americans work. Upon the news, the stock market fell again.

And yet, despite the attempts to bury the Signal story, the scandal seems, if anything, to be growing. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) wrote a public letter to Trump yesterday calling for him to fire Hegseth, accurately referring to him as “the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in American history.” Jeffries wrote: “His behavior shocks the conscience, risked American lives and likely violated the law.” “[H]ey Sen[ator Joni] Ernst and Sen[ator Thom] Tillis,” Jen Rubin of The Contrarian wrote tonight, “proud of your votes for Hegseth? This is on [you] too as much as Hegseth. You knew he was not remotely qualified.”

—

Notes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegseth-goldberg/682176/

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/signal-leak-houthis-pete-hegseth-mike-waltz-tulsi-gabbard-john-ratcliffe-6195ab3b

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-envoy-steve-witkoff-signal-text-group-chat-russia-putin/

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/hegseth-waltz-gabbard-private-data-and-passwords-of-senior-u-s-security-officials-found-online-a-14221f90-e5c2-48e5-bc63-10b705521fb7

https://www.wired.com/story/michael-waltz-left-his-venmo-public/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nsa-signal-app-vulnerabilities-before-houthi-strike-chat/

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/21/nx-s1-5305288/trump-fires-chairman-joint-chiefs-of-staff-charles-brown-pentagon

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/21/trump-hegseth-joint-chiefs-cq-brown-jr

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/25/signal-cybersecurity-trump-war-planning-00246881

https://abcnews.go.com/US/lawsuit-trump-administrations-signal-group-chat-assigned-judge/story?id=120175517

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/26/nx-s1-5341359/intelligence-leaders-signal-house-hearing

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/opinion/americas-security-blunder-is-the-gift-of-a-lifetime.html

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/26/politics/the-atlantic-publishes-signal-messages-yemen-strike/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/trump-signs-executive-order-requiring-proof-citizenship-register-vote-rcna198094

https://americanoversight.org/litigation/american-oversight-v-hegseth-gabbard-ratcliffe-bessent-rubio-and-nara-regarding-military-actions-planned-on-signal-messaging-app/

https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/trumps-latest-executive-order-is-a-sham-and-a-warning/

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2025/01/13/meet-some-of-trumps-senior-nsc-team-00195922

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/economics/trump-administration-floats-exemptions-tariffs-canadian-mexican-goods-rcna195110

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/trump-announces-new-auto-tariffs-ratcheting-global-trade/story?id=120183740

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3ll5v5sf42o2j

olgalautman.bsky.social/post/3ll663snbc224

duckworth.senate.gov/post/3llbyoaewdc2m

katiephang.bsky.social/post/3llcijr3xfk2h

annabower.bsky.social/post/3llcejsanjc2n

barbmcquade.bsky.social/post/3llcel2iwwg2t

hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social/post/3lla7lqbf3s2b

jenrubin.bsky.social/post/3llcy6o7kwc2p

AP News video: https://apnews.com/video/trump-calls-signal-chat-fallout-a-witch-hunt-says-the-messaging-app-could-be-defective-eefc642d64ba4117908d9543c0832c8e

Youtube:

watch?v=VaAmN92CKFg

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Oversize SUVs are making traffic worse, in Bloomberg.

I bought my family an SUV in early 2023, and it was the first time in my life that I owned a car that was more than fifteen feet long. While spacious inside, at 186″ in length ours is still considered relatively small by modern SUV standards.

Truthfully, those modern standards are totally out of whack with how big our personal vehicles should and need to be. All that mass results in lower fuel economy, faster tire degradation and more wear-and-tear on our already strained roads.

A friend bought a GMC Yukon XL that makes him laugh with glee at its ridiculousness. At 225.2″ in length, it is a more than three and a half feet longer than any of the cars I owned prior to 2023. It’s subtantially taller and wider, too.

Here’s an example of how much things have changed. In high school, our friend Frank’s dad had a brand-new, loaded 1991 Toyota Land Cruiser. It was huge! When he drove it to school we all wanted to check it out. We called it the Frank Tank.

That huge, show-stopping Frank Tank (188.2″ long, 72″ wide) is slightly smaller than a run-of-the-mill 2025 Hyundai Santa Fe (190.2″ and 74.8″).

Me: "I should stick to fresh veggies and nutritious meals without lots of excessive packaging."

Also me: "Grocery Outlet has Hello Kitty Hot Sour soup cups for half a buck each, I should try that!"

A Republican lawmaker in Missouri has introduced legislation to create a registry of pregnant women who are “at risk” of having an abortion, The Guardian reports.

The bill’s author characterized it as an “eHarmony for babies” that could also help match adoptive parents with babies.

I guess this is going to become a theme for who knows how long. For reasons I cannot begin to understand, the Trump administration’s distaste for any criticism of itself, as well as any politics it does not agree with, is resulting in many in corporate America folding into alignment with those desires. Whether it’s the capitulation to an anti-DEI stance or an exit from any kind of political entanglements, the general stance appears to be that all the boots must be licked as thoroughly as possible.

That puts companies like Ben & Jerry’s, famous for its social stances, in a tough spot. The company has not been shy about criticizing the Trump team, going all the way back to the first administration. Nor has it been shy about taking moral stances on conflicts around the world, with one such stance notably resulting in some level of backing from its parent company, Unilever.

While Ben & Jerry’s has decades of activism as part of its corporate tradition, Unilever appears to have tried to stamp that out starting in 2025. The parent company refused to allow B&J to issue corporate statements criticizing the Trump administration on matters of politics. This resulted in a lawsuit against Unilever, with B&J claiming that Unilever is contractually obligated to allow for B&J’s independent ability to make those statements as part of the acquisition. This ramped up even further more recently with the news that Unilever terminated B&J CEO David Stever as a result of his activism.

In an amended complaint filed Tuesday in New York, lawyers for the ice cream brand said that rules stemming from its 2000 merger “protects Ben & Jerry’s interests by precluding the unilateral removal of its CEO,” but Unilever did just that — “removing and replacing” CEO David Stever by not following the proper protocols and said it was because of the brand’s continued comments on progressive issues.

The lawsuit said that Unilever’s motive for the removal of Stever was due to his “commitment to Ben & Jerry’s Social Mission and Essential Brand Integrity … rather than any genuine concerns regarding his performance history.”

This elective censorship in order to appease ranking politicians ought to scare the hell out of everybody. Whatever you might think about B&J’s opinions on politics, we surely don’t want to foster an ecosystem of feigned group-think. The only thing that changed between 2024 and 2025 was the new presidential administration. The stances by B&J haven’t changed. The company’s desire to speak on those stances hasn’t changed. The type of rhetoric in those desired statements haven’t changed.

This is purely about Unilever deciding, counter-contractually as alleged, that it wants to bow at the altar of Donald Trump. And the tactics from Unilever appears to be decidedly heavy-handed.

Ben & Jerry’s initial lawsuit, filed in November 2024, alleged Unilever silenced its attempts to publicly support Palestinian refugees and resolutions to end military aid to Israel, where the company had done business since 1987.

It also alleged that Unilever threatened to dismantle Ben & Jerry’s board and sue members because the company’s management and board planned to issue a statement calling for “peace” and a “permanent and immediate ceasefire.”

This is a marriage of the free market and free speech, ideals that the conservative party in America has long championed. If people don’t like B&J’s politics, they’re free to buy a different brand of ice cream. If Unilever doesn’t like those politics, but are disallowed contractually from censoring them, then Unilever can sell the company to someone else, which is reportedly exactly what Unilever is doing.

If corporate America is simply going to rollover based on the whims of every change in administration, that kind of whipsawing on corporate stances is going to get real confusing, real fast. If this is only being done with this administration out of fear, which I believe is the case, that should be setting off all kinds of alarm bells.

And if the so-called speech-champions can’t be bothered to get out of bed to advocate for speech protections they don’t agree with, then we can cease calling them champions of speech, full stop.