Tuesday, 25 March 2025

Trump and the Waltz debacle

The story about America’s war plans for an attack on the Houthis in Yemen being accidentally shared with the editor-in-chief of a political magazine is quite a bombshell, the echoes of which are still reverberating around the world. The BBC described it as a stunning security breach. Senior members of Trump’s cabinet used a proprietary messaging service known as Signal to exchange views, plus top secret details of targets and weapons deployed, with each other and inadvertently with Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic. He was surprised to get what amounts to highly classified information, unsolicited and in real-time, hours before the attacks took place.

You can read the absolutely eye-popping article HERE (No£).

The people involved included Vice President JD Vance, Pete Hegseth Defence Secretary, Mike Waltz National Security Adviser, Tulsi Gabbard Director of National Intelligence, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East Envoy, Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and eleven others.

Waltz had unintentionally invited Goldberg to join a Signal chat group called the “Houthi PC small group” four days before the attacks which he accepted. The journalist was then party to the chat over four days between top officials, apparently with nobody questioning who JG was in the conversation.

The messages were scheduled to delete themselves automatically a few days after they were sent, to avoid the rule that government communications must always be preserved. It's being claimed that crimes were committed by all of those involved. This is apart from the diplomatic fallout over some of the private views about Europe being a 'free-loader' on the USA.

Hilary Clinton was attacked relentlessly by Republicans over months during the 2016 election campaign for her use of private email servers while she was Secretary of State. But she didn’t send classified information or plans for bombing adversaries over insecure channels.

Marco Rubio said at the time that Mrs Clinton’s actions exposed US strategy to foreign intelligence agencies and what she did amounted to “incompetence, malpractice and was inexcusable.” What he was caught doing a few days ago was far worse.

She tweeted:

Mike Johnson, Republican Speaker of the House, seemed almost relaxed about the astonishing failure, saying: “I’m told they’re doing an investigation to find out how [Goldberg's] number was included, and that should be that… I’m not sure that it requires much additional attention.”  If this had happened under Joe Biden, the right-wing media would have had a field day with Johnson leading the mob.

Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, was in the White House a few days ago criticising the Biden administration for making America look like fools:

I think you would be safe in betting that what happened was just the first of what will become many catastrophic political debacles under Trump and his cabal of fourth raters. Electing an idiot who goes on to appoint people of even lower intellectual wattage for fear of his own stupendous ignorance being exposed, can only lead to more and more of these utter fiascos.

Up to now, Trump, over the past 60 days or so, has driven the agenda with his often jaw-dropping and unpredictable actions. But from now on, the agenda will be driving him.  This kind of shambles will be commonplace.  Do not underestimate the depth of stupidity at the top of the American government.

Trumpism

Trumpism, if there is anything that makes it worth having a doctrine named after it, didn’t come about by accident. The right, funded by Russia in many cases, has been working on destroying the West, particularly America and the EU, for decades. Trump is simply a bit-part player in that plot.

We have been complicit for too long and too complacent in thinking our democratic institutions could withstand the forces arraigned against them. But now, as we see the results of the Kremlin’s substantial and long-term investments in secret efforts to influence Western elections, you must admit Russia has done a remarkable job.

I am not sure we will ever know the full extent of it, but you might want to read this article in Vsquare, a Central European investigative website, about how the Heritage Foundation, a US right-wing think tank, is going about doing to Europe what it's doing at the moment in the USA. It is a Project 2025 for Europe.

The Heritage Foundation is said to be working with "illiberal forces in Poland and Hungary to shape its stance on the European Union."

"A forthcoming closed-door workshop at Heritage underscores this growing alliance, featuring key contributions from Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) and Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture. MCC is essentially a GONGO – a government-organized non-governmental organization – serving as a front for Viktor Orbán’s government, while Ordo Iuris has close ties to Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice opposition party."

VSquare has obtained a brief two-page summary (a so-called “factsheet”) of proposals to 'reform' the EU, titled: The Great Reset. An Urgent Need for Drastic Reform, set to be presented and debated with Heritage.

Both the organisations mentioned, MCC and Ordo Luris, apparently have links to Russia and are said to have "long engaged with networks that promote Kremlin-aligned narratives, including Agenda Europe and the World Congress of Families – a group linked to Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev."

MCC is apparently largely funded through dividends from trade in Russian oil by a Hungarian oil company MOL.  A recent report pointed out that MCC earned €50 million in 2023 from MOL share dividends, with 65% of MOL’s oil coming from Russia – effectively using Russian oil profits to promote Orbán’s pro-Russian agenda. It is clearly a well-funded operation.

Recently, a German investigation has revealed that MCC’s Brussels-based publication, The European Conservative, employed a journalist secretly working for Voice of Europe, a Kremlin-funded disinformation outlet dismantled in 2024 by European counterintelligence agencies. 

A few days ago Austrian authorities uncovered a cell they claim was working for Russian intelligence that was set up shortly after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the purpose of which was to influence public opinion against Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, both online and on the ground mostly in Austria, by using far-right and nationalist stickers and graffiti, which it claimed pro-Ukrainian activists were behind.

I believe we are only seeing the very tip of the tip of an iceberg of Russian influencers around the world, working every day to damage and destabilise Western democracies, to destroy faith in democratic institutions and even in truth itself. In short, to make us like Putin's Russia. 

These are dangerous times. Europe needs to wake up.

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