President Donald Trump

One of the guys in the chat was in Russia when all this was happening

Literally can't make this **** up

I really hope you're not comparing these two things... private email servers, and open texting active war plans. I'm going to assume you're not.

Let's not get confused. Officials use signal (approved source) and I'm sure other forms of non-approved communication services, to have non-classified discussion. It's out of convenience I'm sure.

However, active war plans on unofficial channels, completely different, and not acceptable for extremely obvious reasons. These people know better.

In a country that decided to give prosecutorial powers to the executive (an asinine decision imho), you cannot expect a party to prosecute it's own people unless popular demand for that is incredibly big *within the party itself*.

You need a system built under the assumption everyone is a selfish evil bastard who will try to exploit the system for his own advantage basically. The USA is slowly learning they aren't an exception to that rule.

In a proper system it would be a very grave offence to do what they did IF the rules in place for communication are sensible (let's assume they are) so they should all at the very minimum be banned for life from holding any political office or being public employees or working for public contractors.

But that's a very different system than the american one

The information was objectively top secret at the time, but its kind of like Obama going on national TV to reveal the operation to kill Bin Laden after the fact.

Once the controllers of the information call you a liar hack and say the information wasn't top secret well its not on Goldberg to practice proper provenance and controls

They are under the lens of violations of rules that prescribe to use only official channels to discuss stuff. Technically perhaps signal is worse because it autodeletes messages after a while making it harder to retrieve what was said by whom but at the end hillary server was wiped as well so it's not very different.

Afaik hillary email server was used to discuss secret material as well.

It's not about "non approved services", it's that in theory they should copy all written communications that happen outside the official signals between them into official record within a few days (lol).

And then there is the device being used which isn't necessarily a secure one and so on.

THEN on top you have the very funny event of the journalist being there which is another layer (Which doesn't have comparison with hillary and others) of violations

Yesterday, we asked officials across the Trump administration if they objected to us publishing the full texts. In emails to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the White House, we wrote, in part: “In light of statements today from multiple administration officials, including before the Senate Intelligence Committee, that the information in the Signal chain about the Houthi strike is not classified, and that it does not contain ‘war plans,’ The Atlantic is considering publishing the entirety of the Signal chain.”

We sent our first request for comment and feedback to national-security officials shortly after noon, and followed up in the evening after most failed to answer.
Late yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response: “As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic] — yes, we object to the release.” (The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security.)

So just to be clear... you're not comparing the two... correct? They are totally different. You can do it... you can admit it. It's ok.

There was no active military war planning on Hillary's emails.

Literally days into Trump 1.0, he was also caught using private email servers and personal phones (non-encrypted). This after railing against Hillary for months about it.

Nope he was charged with aiding/solicitating the hacking attempt that was the main charge.

In fact he pleaded guilty of violation of the Espionage Act.

If Assange had received the information from anonymous sources he wouldn't have been guilty of publishing that, while recruiting people with security clearance and asking them actively to commit illegal acts to provide information to Assange so that they can "show the truth" or whatever is indeed a crime.

It's like the difference between someone coming to you to sell gold coins, or you asking someone who works in a jewelry to steal stuff to resell to you.

I am comparing the 2 (and as i said, many other cases) for the use of unofficial channels to communicate, which by itself is basically always a violation of the law (because the follow up transcription into official records never happen).

I am not comparing the 2 for giving access to civilians without clearance.

Bizzarelly from what i gather you can TALK (by phone or other tools), what you can't do is write (unless you then register it in the official records)

Pathetic.

This is the funniest **** i've seen in a long time

The fact Trumps team is doubling down and on the attack just makes it so much funnier

When you don't hold your own accountable, you enable incompetence.

yeah i know

i'm just saying there's a lengthy precedent here where the journalist would not have published this is it happened pre-watergate and in many countries, despite how it was managed, he would have still faced serious charges for publishing

it would not surprise me if 9/10 times when something like this has happened in modern times that they opted not to publish

He's one of the *REAL* men... very manly man. A drunk who abuses women, and never makes mistakes, never apologizes.

He did find Jesus though, so it's all good now.

This pussy azz reporter wouldn't know war plans from a casual celebration of bombing and killing people. He hasn't seen real action... like the manly Petie.

you think journalists were mistakenly added PERSONALLY to secret chats of high level government officials discussing very serious stuff, ROUTINELY?

This could be a first in history tbh from what we know.

What happened routinely was that various sources, often with doubtful credibility, came to journalists claiming they had secret material than they wanted the journalist to publish and yes in those cases i suppose in many times journalists decided not to publish for a variety of reasons (mainly that they couldn't corroborate).

But lol if the journalist is personally there when the material gets distributed and he knows for a fact (After corroboration, he waited some time becaues he thought it was a joke to begin with) the high level officials are who they claimed to be... i think they would all have published.

Just as a side note, if you haven't read the full text exchange in the article, I'd recommend it. I wouldn't plan a software release w/ my team this loosely. It's like they are trying to justify extremely important trade and social impact less than a few hours before executing this military operation.

Shouldn't you have already figured all this out well in advance? It's really bizarre just on that alone. I had to read it all a couple of times to make sure I wasn't missing something.

I knew there was extreme incompetence, and that's what saved us all in Trump 1.0... but holy fk. I can't believe this sht show of characters. They are discussing topics like cartoon characters. They have such shallow, shallow understanding of the world they are interacting with, it's extremely alarming.

no but i'm saying they'll regularly have things just flung at them

it's also very possible that some staffer intentionally invited him

i mean there's good reason why he was so skeptical and didn't believe it was a real group until the things they discussed actually started happening because it happens a lot

just when i worked as a journalist i'd regularly receive documents, usually made up by people with mental health issues - sometimes real, but you don't know why you're receiving it or whether it's been altered/etc so it's usually ignored unless you can independently verify and that's very difficult given the nature of them being top secret

and there was a time when media was more concerned with protecting the credibility of their government than they were in publishing a piece with a title sounding like it was written by a porno screenwriter

I imgine it's very annoying for all the enemy intelligenve services who have worked so hard.

Now every idiot get's the info and worse, everyone knows it.

Haha yeah. Asking why they wouldn’t admit mistake or not attack the reporter for no reason at this point is pretty insane. Might as well ask why they didn’t hire competent people who wouldn’t do stuff like this in the first place.

Fact is that mission was irrelevant for americans but very relevant (at least the goals were/are) for europeans. So there was the tension about europeans not being able to deal with it themselves and so on.

Not sure how you imagine people at their level discuss those things, do you think it happens like in the west wing show? i have no first hand knowledge of high level politician discussions among themselves but i don't personally expect them to discuss stuff better than we do in this forum

this is wrong

You aren't even allowed to have classified conversations in the hallway outside of a conference room

It happens all the time, sure, but its not allowed

Yeah this whole situation is so ****ing stupid.

"We did nothing wrong, but you shouldn't release the texts because there is nothing classified. Also, you are a hack fraud liar piece of ****"

As I've said before, I come from a family of politicians. I've sat and discussed many topics w/ people in office. I've had casual conversation that's more informed and knowledgeable than this.

But that aside, you shouldn't be deciding and clarifying your mission objectives hours before pressing the fire button. It's not as if this was going to be your only opportunity to bomb Houthis, and this was some major pressing issue of the day. All of this should be made clear to all channels, and major impact points understood, well before launching an attack.

LOL there is a rumor that they actually thought they had added Jonah Goldberg (editor in chief of the Dispatch, AEI member), not Jeffrey Goldberg

what???