Fallout from the Signalgate affair spreads wider

Rachel Reeves seems certain to announce more spending cuts later today and will probably try to sneak in a few tax rises too, as the economy continues to struggle. I am disappointed that she and Starmer have closed their minds against the obvious solution to the sluggish post-Brexit growth problem that has bedevilled us for the last decade. Trump’s eccentric attitude to Europe, his bizarre pro-Kremlin approach to global issues, and now the 25% tariffs on our car exports ought to be driving us into the arms of Brussels, but even all that isn’t quite enough - yet. However,  be in no doubt that pressure to do the right thing is mounting.

Brexit has in any case, taken a back seat as we watch events unfold in America with shock and awe, to use George W Bush’s phrase.

The Signalgate scandal has confirmed several things we already knew about Trump’s administration, that it is largely made up of wholly incompetent morons, way out of their depth and scornful of official processes and advice. We also see how their public rhetoric about Europe wasn’t just intended to spur us on to higher NATO spending but is part of a wider private agenda to destabilise the EU and give the far-right on this side of the Atlantic a boost. JD Vance and Pete Hegseth seem genuinely to hate us because we lean toward a more socialist society.

The Atlantic has now released all of the chat messages except the name of a serving CIA officer, after Trump's spokeswoman and Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, CIA chief, confirmed under oath to a Congressional committee that there was no classified information in the messages accidentally sent to Jeffrey Goldberg. More on this below.

It appears the administration’s use of the messaging App Signal wasn’t limited to the small group planning the attack on the Houthi’s in Yemen. According to this report, the Department of Defence has officially deployed Signal on government issued mobile phones for senior leaders.

It appears to be part of a move to avoid having their deliberations and decision making processes recorded and available for scrutiny later by Congress or the courts. With Signal, you can set messages to be automatically wiped after a period of time and therefore not accessible via a subpoena or a freedom of information request.

Using the App for government business appears to violate several laws, including the 1978 Presidential Records Act, the Espionage Act of 1917, and the 1950 Federal Records Act. The report goes as far as claiming Signal is now "a primary means of communications for Trump Administration senior leaders."

Security source inside the Department of Defence day they were "ordered by political appointees to ignore information security regulations and install Signal on government phones for senior leaders."

If true, one can only be more concerned about what Trump and his army of acolytes in The White House are planning to do that can't stand the light of day.

We now learn via a report in the German newspaper Der Spiegel that the private contact details of some the people involved in Signalgate can be found on the internet. Reporters from Der Spiegel were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials including, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth.

"Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles in apps that track running data. There are also WhatsApp profiles for the respective phone numbers and even Signal accounts in some cases."

And:

"It remains unclear, however, whether this extremely problematic chat was conducted using Signal accounts linked to the private telephone numbers of the officials involved. Tulsi Gabbard has declined to comment. DER SPIEGEL reporting has demonstrated, though, that privately used and publicly accessible telephone numbers belonging to her and Waltz are, in fact, linked to Signal accounts."

The implication being that if newspaper reporters can find this stuff (much of it now deleted after Der Spiegel requested comments) relatively easily, a foreign intelligence service could do it even easier.

Another website reports that Waltz left the names of hundreds of his friends and contacts, including journalists, military officers and lobbyists, open and accessible on his Venmo account. Venmo is an American mobile payment service owned by PayPal. This it is claimed could be useful to malign foreign actors.

The New York Times suggests all this will prove a test for the FBI and the Department of Justice. They note that neither appears ready to launch an investigation. My guess is that they won't:

“This is something that would normally be investigated by the F.B.I. and D.O.J.,” said Mary McCord, a longtime senior official for the Justice Department who now teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center.

“Even if a person is in lawful possession of national defense information, putting it on Signal — which is not an approved, secure means of communicating such information — prosecutors could determine it was gross negligence, which is a felony,” Ms. McCord said.

The administration is sticking to its claim that none of the information shared was classified. In order to avoid admitting it was a mistake, it is prepared to create a precedent that if someone comes into possession of details of an upcoming military attack on a US adversary in the future, they could lawfully publish it and use the statements made over the last 24 hours as their defence.

That's how far they're prepared to go to avoid accountability. It's something they will all come to regret.