Foreign Spies to Team Trump: 👊🇺🇸🔥; The New York Times, March 26, 2025

Noah Shachtman , The New York Times; Foreign Spies to Team Trump: 👊🇺🇸🔥

"The people at the center of Signalgate — the national security adviser, Michael Waltz; the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; to name a few — all know this. They all served in the military. They no doubt heard innumerable lectures from counterintelligence experts about all the different ways an adversary can make off with sensitive data. But this is an administration that actively, proudly rejects expertise. It casts those who have it as the corrupt old guard, the real enemy, the “deep state,” and it touts its own refusal to heed them as proof of its legitimacy and righteousness. By that view, the security establishment must be bent to the White House’s will, and if the people at the top don’t have the traditional qualifications for their positions, all the better. This is an administration that makes a weekend Fox News host the leader of the world’s largest military, puts a conspiracy-minded podcaster in charge of the F.B.I., and has at its pinnacle a reality star turned president. Blunders like this are an inevitable consequence."

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal; The Atlantic, March 26, 2025

Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris , The Atlantic; Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal

"On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat—the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz—we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

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."

Elon Musk’s Power Grab Is Lawless, Dangerous, and—Yes—a Coup; Slate, February 4, 2025

DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN, Slate;  Elon Musk’s Power Grab Is Lawless, Dangerous, and—Yes—a Coup

"The federal government is currently under relentless and unlawful assault by a man no one elected to lead it. With Donald Trump’s blessing and enabling, Elon Musk and his confederates have laid siege to the executive branch in an onslaught whose appalling and far-reaching consequences have barely begun to be reported, much less understood. Musk’s team is tearing through federal agencies at a shocking clip, gaining access to classified material, private personal information, and payment systems that distribute trillions of dollars every year, all in alleged breach of the law. The richest person in the world, who works for no recognizable government entity and answers to nobody, apparently believes he has unilateral authority to withhold duly appropriated funds, violate basic security protocols protecting state secrets, and abolish a global agency in direct contravention of Congress’ explicit command. He is reportedly leading a purge of the federal workforce, persecuting life-saving charities, and pushing outprincipled civil servants who stand in the way of his rampage."

"We Were Never Here and You Saw Nothing"; Bizarro, 7/19/16

Dan Piraro, Bizarro:

"We Were Never Here and You Saw Nothing"

Hillary Clinton Is Criticized for Private Emails in State Dept. Review; New York Times, 5/25/16

Steven Lee Myers, New York Times; Hillary Clinton Is Criticized for Private Emails in State Dept. Review:

"The State Department’s inspector general sharply criticized Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying she had not sought permission to use it and would not have received it if she had.

In a report delivered to members of Congress on Wednesday, the inspector general said that Mrs. Clinton “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business” with officials responsible for handling records and security but that inspectors found “no evidence” that she had."

Obama Declassification Holds Promise of Uncovering New Evidence on Argentina's Dirty War; National Security Archive, 3/23/16

National Security Archive; Obama Declassification Holds Promise of Uncovering New Evidence on Argentina's Dirty War:

"Reinforcing the Obama administration’s planned “comprehensive effort to declassify” historical records on Argentina’s dirty war, the National Security Archive today posted examples of the kinds of materials in U.S. government files that would most likely enhance public understanding of that troubled period in Latin American history. The posted documents, relating not just to regional developments but to official U.S. policy and operations, were declassified either through similar government decrees -- thus setting a useful precedent for current administration officials -- or the U.S. Freedom of Information Act."

No Classified Emails by Clinton? Some Experts Are Skeptical; New York Times, 3/11/15

Scott Shane, New York Times; No Classified Emails by Clinton? Some Experts Are Skeptical:

"“As a longtime critic of the government’s massive overclassification, I thought it was a refreshing touch that the secretary of state conducted all her email in unclassified form,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He spoke with a hint of sarcasm — his nonprofit organization has battled the government for decades to overcome classification claims and try to make important official documents public.

Mrs. Clinton insisted that she kept classified information out of her email, as the law required. Storing classified information in a personal, nongovernment email account on a private computer server, like the one at Mrs. Clinton’s home, would be a violation of secrecy laws.

And relations with other countries are particularly subject to secrecy claims. “Foreign government information” — information received from another government with the expectation that it will be held in confidence — is an official category of classified information in secrecy regulations.

A former senior State Department official who served before the Obama administration said that while it was hard to be certain, it seemed unlikely that classified information could be kept out of the more than 30,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton’s staff identified as involving government business.

“I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified,” said the former official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to seem ungracious to Mrs. Clinton. “Was every single email of the secretary of state completely unclassified? Maybe, but it’s hard to imagine.”

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said he suspected that if there had been no fuss and a researcher or journalist had sought all of Mrs. Clinton’s emails under the Freedom of Information Act, the answer might have been different."