Calling the White House’s Bluff, The Atlantic Releases the ‘Houthi PC Small Group’ Signal Text Thread

Jeffrey Goldberg and Shane Harris, reporting once again for The Atlantic:

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

These statements presented us with a dilemma. In The Atlantic’s initial story about the Signal chat — the “Houthi PC small group,” as it was named by Waltz — we withheld specific information related to weapons and to the timing of attacks that we found in certain texts. As a general rule, we do not publish information about military operations if that information could possibly jeopardize the lives of U.S. personnel. That is why we chose to characterize the nature of the information being shared, not specific details about the attacks.

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump — combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts — have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

I linked yesterday to a quote from Hannah Arendt, whom Wikipedia aptly describes as “one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century”. The quote I linked to was her observation that the ranks of authoritarian governments inevitably wind up being filled with “crackpots and fools” because they’re the people whose loyalty is most assured. In some sense the Jedi mind trick is real — it works on the weak-minded. Regardless of one’s political beliefs, no intelligent person of integrity (as opposed to, say, a foreign mole) would participate in a discussion of obviously classified and highly sensitive war plans in a Signal chat. It’s jarring to see it so clearly but U.S. national security is now led entirely by morons.

Most of the quotes on the Goodreads page I linked to, culled from Arendt’s seminal The Origins of Totalitarianism, are related to truth, not idiocy. Here’s one:

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

And:

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

And:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

When The Atlantic’s initial story hit, everyone responsible in the Trump administration, right up to the president himself, just immediately began telling bald-faced lies about what happened, despite the fact that they knew Jeffrey Goldberg literally had the receipts to prove otherwise. That works, until it doesn’t.

★ Wednesday, 26 March 2025