Will there be accountability in the Trump administration — or does the buck stop nowhere, as it did for the previous four years under Biden?
One of the most profound indictments of Joe Biden’s tenure as president of the United States was that he never fired anyone of note who worked for him, no matter the embarrassment, the failure, or the catastrophe.
When the Biden Department of Education botched the rollout of its new FAFSA student-aid application, causing confusion and delays for millions of American families, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona stayed at his post. When the southern border descended into lawlessness and chaos, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas kept his job. When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose his cancer diagnosis and hospitalization to Biden and his White House, Austin returned to run the Pentagon. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a complete and utter debacle. But no senior national security official lost his job for it, ever.
Firing a top official doesn’t always fix an organization’s underlying problems, of course. But when a president cashiers one of his own appointees, it’s an unmistakable acknowledgement that someone has failed, and it’s a hard-boiled message that there will be accountability. Because Biden repeatedly declined to send that message, he begat further failures by reinforcing the sense that the embarrassments, incompetence, and outright failures of his administration would be tolerated by the barely-there occupant of the Oval Office.
And that’s why it’s so important for Donald Trump to publicly defenestrate at least one of his high-profile appointees who are involved in the jaw-dropping scandal of the Houthi bombing-campaign leak, in which a who’s-who of America’s top national-security officials decided to discuss the coordination of a no-kidding shooting war over a Signal chat, despite having inadvertently invited Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg to listen in.
The whole story is a tale so clownish, so stunning, so outlandish that it would seem to better fit into a gonzo satire of government ineptitude such as Burn After Reading or Veep.
But, instead, the real-life national security adviser, Mike Waltz, decided to debate the merits of bombing the terrorist group that runs a foreign country, Yemen, and is an ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran in conversation with the real-life secretary of state (Marco Rubio), defense secretary (Pete Hegseth), CIA director (John Ratcliffe), White House chief of staff (Susie Wiles), treasury secretary (Scott Bessent), director of national intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard), and JD Vance, the vice president of the United States, among others, over an unsecured system in open view of a prominent American journalist!
These U.S. officials chewed over highly sensitive topics such as the merits of U.S. military action against the Houthis, our interests in doing so vis-à-vis our European allies, and then, hours before American servicemen would go into action, operational details about the plan of attack.
They then made sure to dab each other up with embarrassing attaboy emojis.
From Goldberg’s write-up in The Atlantic:
It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.
At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.
The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)
According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.
There are people out there defending these Trump administration officials even now, by claiming that a several-hour heads-up to the Houthis about a coming operation, if leaked, wouldn’t have mattered, or that this was 7D chess to set up Jeffrey Goldberg, or that this is all actually Goldberg’s fault because he’s a radical leftist or something.
But all that is — and I don’t put this lightly — complete BS. The fact that these conversations happened outside of official government communications channels at all is a scandal in itself. It’s a total breach of protocol and operational security (despite the fact that Hegseth made sure to brag in the chat that “we are currently clean on OPSEC.”)
It goes without saying that Trump won’t fire everyone involved in this debacle, which would include most of his senior national-security staff. (And Trump can’t, of course, fire Vice President Vance.)
I doubt many of these officials will even get disciplined — even though every last one of them is complicit in this scandal. At a minimum, not a single one of these officials objected to the fact that the conversation was happening over Signal at all, despite all of them having an affirmative duty to object to that medium of conversation. Not one of them protested the sharing of sensitive military-operations information or intervened to say, “Hey, let’s talk about this later over the appropriate secure channels.”
But Trump should hold someone accountable. It’s likely that federal law was broken in this incident. At the absolute very least, these officials conducted themselves extraordinarily foolishly and in a manner that is unbecoming of their offices. They have lost the credibility to criticize the past, present, and future mishandling of sensitive American national-security information (such as Hillary Clinton’s home-brew email server, and Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s stashing of documents in their garages and bathrooms).
In my view, the most egregious behavior was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s. (The stupidest was National Security Adviser Mike Waltz’s adding of Goldberg to the conversation in the first place.)
Pete Hegseth — the top civilian in the Department of the Defense and a man who has command authority over U.S. military operations worldwide — texted information, over an unsecured channel, that “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.” That’s shocking, egregious, and totally outrageous.
President Trump should demand Pete Hegseth’s resignation. Today.
A question now hangs over this administration: Will there be accountability under Trump — or does the buck stop nowhere, as it did for the previous four years?