The second Trump administration’s first major scandal continues to boil. “SignalGate” is rather simple, as Beltway scandals go. It’s about the use of Signal, the encrypted messaging app, by top Trump national security officials to discuss current military events. The controversy centers on officials who posted classified information. Inconveniently, Jeffrey Goldberg, a top liberal journalist and longtime Trump nemesis, was bizarrely invited into this close-hold chat.  

The White House naturally denies any wrongdoing, but to those with experienced national security eyes, some of the information posted in “Houthi PC small group” certainly looks classified. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on March 15 posted detailed information about imminent U.S. military strikes against Houthi terrorists in Yemen. National Security Council boss Mike Waltz subsequently shared intelligence assessments of the bombing’s immediate effect. In any normal Beltway universe, such information, shared in real-time, is unquestionably classified. 

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Team Trump has mishandled this affair from the start. Instead of admitting to an error, the White House boisterously denied any misdeeds. Here, the usual Trumpian bluff and bluster failed to make the problem go away. Instead, this tactic made a two-day story into a significant scandal. Many congressional Republicans privately don’t accept the administration’s claims that the information posted in the Signal chat was wholly unclassified.

Worse, blanket declarations from top national security officials, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, that the information posted in the chat group was unclassified allowed Goldberg to publish the contents he saw there without legal consequence. Team Trump now looks foolish and dishonest at the very top. 

So what? say MAGA enthusiasts. They assert that these strikes showed Trump’s toughness against the Houthis and its Iranian benefactors, in contrast with Joe Biden’s weakness in this regard. The strikes were a success, and even if the Signal group was unwise, no American lives were lost. That’s the Trumpian line on this scandal, and the White House is sticking to it, at least for now. 

Waltz nearly lost his job over this affair, according to informed gossip in the nation’s capital. After all, he invited Goldberg, a declared MAGA enemy, into the private chat for reasons that haven’t been explained plausibly by the White House. Credible reports that the “Houthi PC small group” wasn’t the only Signal chat being run by the national security adviser raise awkward questions. As the Wall Street Journal explained, “Two U.S. officials also said that Waltz has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national security conversations on Signal with cabinet members, including separate threads on how to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine as well as military operations. They declined to address if any classified information was posted in those chats.” 

Waltz isn’t out of the woods yet. Trump’s true believers always considered him suspect, a possible RINO in MAGA clothing possessing neocon tendencies. Whether Waltz is heading the NSC in a couple of months looks like an open question. 

Hegseth has emerged from SignalGate with less damage than he deserves. It was his posting of details regarding imminent Pentagon strikes on Yemen that caused the most concern from an operational security viewpoint. Hegseth’s responses to media queries about the chat group were petulant and dishonest. Moreover, this scandal coincides with the revelation that he’s been taking his wife, a former Fox News producer, to sensitive meetings with foreign military officials.

Then there’s Hegseth’s younger brother, a podcaster who’s been given a plum Pentagon job for which he possesses no obvious qualifications. Trump pulled out all the stops with Congress to get Hegseth, a combative Fox News talker with a sparse defense resume, confirmed as Pentagon boss, so he’s staying put. 

SignalGate will gradually fade out, having started a helpful conversation about the security of common messaging apps, but it’s not over. The real story here is the one that the public can’t see. That’s the foreign intelligence dimension. 

Behind the scenes, U.S. counterspies are deeply concerned about this scandal and how many secrets from the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community got spilled in that Signal chat — and possibly several others run by top national security officials. This isn’t a new problem. National security bigwigs in the Biden administration also employed Signal to discuss government business in chat groups. We don’t know if they discussed classified information there since they didn’t mistakenly invite any journalists into such groups. 

The overarching issue here is the vulnerability of Signal and all messaging apps to attacks by first-rank foreign intelligence services. While Signal is unquestionably safer than simply using regular text on your phone, it’s not secure against exploitation by major espionage adversaries such as Russia and China. Top-tier signals intelligence services have been working hard to crack into Signal with success. 

Which is why the National Security Agency in mid-February warned its employees against using Signal for any business unless it’s completely unclassified. NSA cited concerns that “Russian professional hacking groups” had cracked into Signal. This referred to a report issued on Feb. 19 by Google Threat Intelligence, which detailed how Kremlin hackers working for Russian military intelligence, known as GRU, successfully compromised Signal chats being employed by Ukrainian senior officials. GRU hackers did this through the crafty use of malicious QR codes that look like authentic Signal invites and security warnings. One wrong click and the Russians are in your phone.  

This is the same GRU that’s supplying Houthi rebels not just with weapons and logistical support but with detailed, real-time intelligence to assist the terrorist group with its attacks on Western shipping, including U.S. Navy vessels. 

Every Western senior security official is considered a “high value target” for Russian and Chinese intelligence. Nowhere is this truer than in Washington, DC. The number of spies from hostile intelligence services operating around our nation’s capital is difficult to calculate but can be reckoned in the many hundreds, at least. If you’re holding a top gig inside the Beltway in anything relating to national security, GRU and other foreign spy agencies are trying to hack your phone. The Russians and the Chinese aren’t the only ones with this capability, but they’re the biggest counterintelligence threats we face today. 

That German journalists, employing open sources, were able to determine the current phone numbers and email addresses, in some cases even passwords, belonging to several top Trump officials involved in SignalGate indicates how serious this threat is. Just imagine the capabilities of any top-rank SIGINT service possessing vast amounts of secret data about their targets, plus aggressive cyber-espionage.  

Factoring in human intelligence sharpens the counterintelligence risk. Quality HUMINT married to effective SIGINT can lead to significant espionage breakthroughs. All over Washington, every day, foreign spies, posing as everything from diplomats to think-tankers, collect whatever information they can about HVTs — and those who work for them. If you can crack into the phone of a bigwig’s personal assistant, it’s frequently a short jump to getting into the HVT’s communications, too. Every business card containing a phone number and email address is a possible goldmine for HUMINT collectors around the Beltway.  

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TURNS THE SCREWS ON FREE SPEECH

A few years ago, a senior staffer for a Cabinet official lost his phone. He didn’t report the compromise to security officials because it was his personal device, not a government phone. Within a few days, his boss and several other top administration officials experienced aggressive cyberattacks on their personal phones. Regrettably, some of those efforts succeeded. Counterspies opened up an investigation, during which the staffer recalled that, just a couple of days before he misplaced his phone, he had a strange encounter at a cocktail party with an unusually gregarious official from a foreign embassy. That country wasn’t a friend of the United States. How the staffer exactly lost his phone was never determined. 

That sounds like a spy movie, but it was just another day in the counterintelligence business in our nation’s capital. 

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.