President Tries to Divert Blame in War Plan Leak

Playing Down the Breach as Democrats Call It a 'Sloppy' Error

Author

Matt Davis
March 26, 2025

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The front page photo this morning features a woman with her son in Ukraine. It’s tricky to get medical treatment when Russia is bombing your country.

Today’s lead story by Tyler Pager and David E. Sanger is about President Donald Trump attempting to deny, deflect, and attack, in response to news that his top administration officials shared war plans in a group text last week. Here’s a lovely shot of him doing that yesterday.

I also think he’s been taking Ozempic. Don’t you?

Trump told the media the information shared was “not classified,” and stood by his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who had inadvertently added the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat on the Signal app, which included Vice President JD Vance and others. The distinction of what was classified or not is significant because “the president and the secretary of defense have the ability to assert, even retroactively, that information is declassified.” But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared information on timing, targets, and weapons systems to be used in an attack on Houthi militants in Yemen. That sounds super secret to me, whatever Trump might be claiming afterwards.

“Former national security officials said they were skeptical that the information shared by Mr. Hegseth ahead of the March 15 strike was not classified, given the life-or-death nature of the operation.”

Yup. So. That’s denial, covered. And deflection. What about attack?

Hegseth (I’m having trouble pronouncing his last name and also, not sure whether I should bother learning to, given the pressure he’s under to resign) attacked the journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, which seems ridiculous.

Mr. Hegseth denounced Mr. Goldberg late Monday, saying he had been “peddling hoaxes time and time again.” But on Tuesday morning, testifying in the Senate, the nation’s top two intelligence officials conceded that the exchanges released by The Atlantic were accurate.

Hoaxes? After all, this is not the guy who runs The Intercept. This is the guy who, after college…well. He volunteered to run an Israeli prison:

Goldberg left college to move to Israel, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces during the First Intifada as a prison guard at Ktzi'ot Prison, where Palestinian participants arrested in the uprising were held. 

So he’s not exactly a radical leftist. In fact one can see why Mr. Waltz would have his number in his phone, however much he’s denying it.

During the meeting at the White House, as reporters peppered the president with questions about the leak, Mr. Trump repeatedly turned to Mr. Waltz to answer. Mr. Waltz tried to largely redirect the focus, lauding the strikes in Yemen and attacking Mr. Goldberg.

Can you say “throwing Mr. Waltz under the bus?”

And here’s Mr. Waltz, who couldn’t look more like a man whose career is about to take a sharp turn into the dustbin.

D’oh! “We are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” Waltz said. The answer is: Waltz added his number to the group chat. That’s how.

I love it when administration security officials use expressions that make them sound like Ned Flanders on “The Simpsons.”

Mr. Trump did kindly call Mr. Goldberg a “sleazebag” during the meeting which I think shows you how much Mr. Goldberg has gotten Mr. Trump’s attention.

Mr. Goldberg rejected the Trump administration’s assertions that no classified information was shared, saying simply: “They are wrong.”

That’s probably the kind of “hard no” he learned in his soft liberal days running that Israeli prison.

But. But. But.

“…the overall response from Mr. Trump and his allies — downplaying the episode while shifting blame onto an opponent — is a timeworn practice that the administration and its chorus of supporters have deployed throughout the president’s political career as they seek to deflect criticism. Mr. Trump is loath to admit mistakes, and while some Democrats called for Mr. Waltz and Mr. Hegseth to resign, the president seems wary of firing his staff. Doing so could puncture his argument that the early months of his second term have been nothing but success.

“They’ve made a big deal out of this because we’ve had two perfect months,” Mr. Trump said.”

I’m not sure I would describe the last two months as “perfect,” personally. Let’s see. I’m struggling to pick a high point. But I can think of, say, ten stories on the front page of the newspaper over the last two months that have made me question Mr. Trump’s ability to govern in the best interests of Americans, as I’ve been reading them, so that you don’t have to. In no particular order:

Still. I hate to be a perfectionist. I realize I didn’t go into failing to secure peace in Ukraine, because let’s face it? That’s hard. As is preventing the spread of disease when you’ve fired the people who do that. We’ve been doing this since February 6 and there’s plenty more options to choose from.

And then, there are consequences.

During a contentious Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday, Democrats denounced the nation’s top spy chiefs, John Ratcliffe, the director of the C.I.A., and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence.

Here’s Kash Patel looking like he wishes he was somewhere else, too:

It’s nice to see the Democrats piling on. Their party’s performance has been so woeful over recent months and they’ve been criticized for “playing possum,” as their political consultants have suggested they do. Not a possum in sight here, though.

“This sloppiness, this disrespect for our intelligence agencies is entirely unacceptable,” Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, said during the hearing, which had been scheduled weeks ago for the presentation of the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment.” “You need to do better.”

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat who is the committee’s vice chair, was visibly angry as he declared that the intelligence officials and others on the group chat had displayed “sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior.” Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat, suggested Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Waltz should resign. Many Democrats have resurfaced clips of Mr. Waltz and other Trump allies from nine years ago, criticizing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

Back to this classified information, for a minute. Even if it wasn't classified, disclosing it in a nonsecure setting could still violate the 1917 Espionage Act. Not that the Justice Department, “stocked” “with loyalists,” as the reporters put it, is likely to pursue that avenue, here. Then there’s some more attacks, which honestly sound rather half-hearted.

“The Atlantic story is nothing more than a section of the NatSec establishment community running the same, tired gameplay from years past,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted on social media.

He added that “at every turn anti-Trump forces have tried to weaponize innocuous actions and turn them into faux outrage that Fake News outlets can use to peddle misinformation. Don’t let enemies of America get away with these lies.”

Those anti-Trump forces sound made-up, really. And saying the “NatSec establishment” is responsible for all this when you run the NatSec establishment just makes you sound like a big liar.

Meanwhile some Republicans are, actually, “definitely concerned,” which I find amazing.

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said his panel would look into what had happened, but provided no details. “We are definitely concerned,” Mr. Wicker told reporters, adding that he and his colleagues on the committee were “considering our options.”

Considering your options is, I think, GOP-Senator-from-Mississippi-speak for hoping the whole thing blows over in the coming days. Or looking for a scapegoat. Probably both.

The law says administrations should preserve records. That means setting up Signal and telling it to automatically delete messages is a no-no. And just in case:

On Tuesday, the watchdog group American Oversight filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Washington seeking a judge’s order to preserve all of the Signal messages on the group chat in question.

What do you think are the chances of those messages being recovered? You may recall that the former prime minister of Great Britain came a-cropper over “losing” about 5,000 WhatsApp messages during Covid.

The New York Post helpfully tries to distract us with the upcoming baseball season this morning, and throws Mr. Waltz under the bus once again without focusing on who his boss is and why that matters.

My bet is that Mr. Waltz will resign early next week after the scandal snowballs over the coming weekend and after some disastrous appearances on “Meet The Press” on Sunday. It could be sooner. I think Pete Hegseth might survive or he might not. You’ll recall that last week, Mr. Hegseth had set up a briefing for Elon Musk about America’s war plans against China.

John R. Bolton, a national security adviser in the first Trump administration, said on social media that he doubted that “anyone will be held to account for events described by The Atlantic unless Donald Trump himself feels the heat.”

Don’t forget Mr. Hegseth’s other multiple transgressions over recent weeks.

Mr. Hegseth also came under sharp critique from the federal judge handling a lawsuit against his efforts to ban transgender troops. “The military ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext,” Judge Ana C. Reyes of U.S. District Court in Washington wrote in a scathing ruling last week.

“Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit and its conclusions bear no relation to fact,” she wrote in her decision temporarily blocking the ban. “Seriously? These were not off-the-cuff remarks at a cocktail party.”

Or…in a group text.

The only thing the Trump administration can be hoping for, at this point, is for some other colossal nightmare to eclipse this one and make us all forget about it. Let’s hope that they don’t choose to manufacture that nightmare on our collective behalf, though. I mean, be careful what you wish for, eh?

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.