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‘Who Exactly Is Running the Government?’: Trump’s War Plans Leak Denial Backfires
President Donald Trump’s claim that he was unaware of a cabinet-level breach of classified information—an incident reportedly involving up to 18 top national security officials discussing sensitive details of a planned military strike—appears to have backfired, raising questions about his knowledge of the actions of his top officials, and, as Commander-in-Chief, his knowledge of U.S. national security and military operations.
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed Monday afternoon that he inadvertently had been included in the 18-person group chat on the unclassified messaging app Signal. Experts say those discussions should never have been held over the app, but rather inside a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or inside multiple SCIFs.
On Monday afternoon at a press conference, a reporter asked the Commander-in-Chief for his reaction to the story in The Atlantic.
“I don’t know anything about it,” was Trump’s immediate response. His next response was to attack the media outlet.
“I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic, it’s, to me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business,” the President declared. “I think it’s not much of a magazine, but I know nothing about it.”
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He then asked the reporter to explain to him what had been reported in The Atlantic.
“You’re saying that they had what?” “Having to do with what?” he asked twice. “What were they talking about?”
After the reporter gave him more information, Trump, seemingly still not understanding all the details, declared that the leak “couldn’t have been very effective because the attack was very effective, I can tell you that.”
He again denied any knowledge of the leak.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump repeated. “You, you’re telling me about it for the first time.”
The White House has acknowledged the leak occurred. Axios called it a “mind-boggling security breach.” The Washington Post reported that “the disclosure raises questions about how the administration has discussed classified issues and whether anyone will be disciplined.”
“As the bombing campaign moved ahead, Hegseth’s [Signal] account shared details that Goldberg said he believed could put at risk the safety of U.S. troops or intelligence officials, especially those deployed in the Middle East,” the Post reported. “Those details, the Atlantic article says, allegedly included the specific weapons to be used and in which sequence the Houthi targets would be hit.”
Military and national security experts are stunned — not only that this massive leak occurred, but that the President was not informed until a reporter asked him about it on Monday.
“If the President is telling the truth and no one’s briefed him about this yet, that’s another story in itself. In any other administration, CoS would have been in the Oval within nanoseconds of learning about something like this, wrote The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols via social media, referring to the White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Nichols is a retired U.S. Naval War College professor who is an expert on national security, international affairs, Russia, and nuclear weapons.
“Heads need to roll for this. They have broken laws and endangered the lives of our service members with this idiocy,” commented Army veteran of 22 years, Fred Wellman, a graduate of West Point and the Harvard Kennedy School.
Journalist Wajahat Ali wrote, “What’s worse is that he HAS no idea, allegedly, about the story, which makes it even worse and more terrifying. Like, bro, why don’t you know?”
“One wild thing about Trump,” observed journalist Isaac Saul, “is that he is notoriously insulated from certain information streams by his team. Absolutely believable that he went out to the podium having not been informed of this massive story bc the people who brief him on info were culpable in the leaks.”
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“Here’s some insight,” offered Sophia Kinzinger, a former press secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “The White House has an entire department, staffed by military professionals, dedicated to facilitating secure communications. They travel with staff, provide devices, and set up SCIFs (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities) whenever and wherever needed, operating 24/7. There is absolutely no excuse for mishandling classified information, especially for someone leading the National Security Council at the White House. Their actions clearly demonstrate a lack of qualification for such a critical role. we deserve better!”
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) added: “If it’s true that the President of the United States had no idea that his war cabinet and VP were discussing war plans on a Signal chat that included a journalist, that is astounding ignorance and profound incompetence.”
Derek Martin, who conducted supply chain counterintelligence at the National Security Agency (NSA), asked: “If Trump doesn’t know about a major incident involving his VP, Chief of Staff, NatSec Advisor, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence, and CIA Director, then who exactly is running the government?”
U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-DE), according to Deadline, wrote: “Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally – that would normally involve a jail sentence. We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe.”
In his report at The Atlantic, Goldberg noted that “coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of ‘national defense’ information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story.”
Goldberg also explained that he chose to not publish all of the texts, noting that, “if [some] had been read by an adversary of the United States, [they] 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.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
Trump on report that cabinet officials were discussing sensitive materials on Signal: I don’t know anything about it.. You’re telling me about it for the first time pic.twitter.com/13LoxXhh9K
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 24, 2025
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Image via Reuters
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The Trump White House is attacking one of its loyal media figures after she berated Vice President JD Vance over President Donald Trump’s Iran deal.
“The problem is, that it’s an absolutely disastrous deal that has brought us to our knees, weeks before our 250th birthday,” NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said in a clip she posted to social media, which Mediaite reported.
“This is an utter humiliation of the United States, and everybody knows it,” she continued. “Everybody knows it, but especially Iran knows it. They are celebrating this. They are still calling us the enemy.”
“And while Iran celebrates this and sneers at us for totally capitulating when we had complete military superiority over them,” she said, “JD Vance is out there criticizing Israel, making up fantasies about how it is Israel’s fault, and Israel wants Iran to be a failed state. And if only Israel would lay down its arms and allow Hezbollah to keep attacking it, there would be peace in the Middle East.”
Ungar-Sargon called Vance’s remarks “disgusting,” “utterly deplorable,” and a “complete Tucker Carlsonification of the Vice President of the United States.”
She warned, “if this was a dry run for Vance 2028,” for president, “we sure learned a lot.”
On social media, Ungar-Sargon added: “VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in.”
The White House’s Rapid Response team blasted Ungar-Sargon.
“The only humiliation here is Batya desperately begging for an additional brain cell because her failing TV … show is even more irrelevant than the likes of Kaitlan Collins and Fake Tapper,” the White House declared. “Only a moron of her caliber could still doubt President Trump’s leadership.”
In 2024, Ungar-Sargon wrote, “American Jews should vote for Trump because he is the candidate who stands most clearly for the things that have defined us for centuries.”
VP JD Vance just brought the US to its knees with a humiliating deal weeks before our 250th birthday and he has the audacity to blame … Israel! … for the terrible situation we’re in. We’re watching the Tucker Carlsonifcation of our Vice President in real time. pic.twitter.com/WL8BdQu6L7
— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) June 18, 2026
Veteran journalist Jonathan Alter has published a fictitious yet “all-too-plausible” scenario whereby President Donald Trump attempts to overturn the results of the 2026 election — especially in the Senate — which could narrowly move to Democratic control in November. He suggests that it will take two sets of citizens: the general public and former U.S. presidents, among others, to defeat what he sees as the current president’s “slow-motion rolling coup attempt,” which he says is “already underway.”
Writing at Washington Monthly, Alter acknowledges that Democratic control of the House after the November election is likely, while control of the Senate is possible but not the “big blue wave” or “tsunami” he sees in the House.
Calling him a “chaos agent,” Alter explains that Trump’s “fear of impeachment and a Senate trial are making him desperate and more dangerous.”
“It’s easy to miss that a slow-motion rolling coup attempt is already underway, staged by Stephen Miller and, of course, Trump himself,” Alter writes. “When Trump told The New York Times early this year that he regretted not seizing voting machines in 2020, that was a clear signal that he will likely try to do so after the midterms.”
Ultimately, Alter predicts in his war-gamed scenario that democracy will prevail but not before a months-long constitutional crisis.
“The resolution of the crisis came after more than two months of efforts by President Trump to overturn the results of the midterm elections with unfounded accusations of vote fraud,” Alter writes, as if it were January 2027. “His efforts sparked mass protests, which gave him a pretext to invoke emergency powers and interfere in elections that, under the U.S. Constitution, are handled by the states.”
Alter points to several critical events when Trump telegraphed his intentions.
January 6, 2026: “You gotta win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told Republicans on the fifth anniversary of what some have called his coup attempt.
That same month: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good,” Trump told The New York Times.
Also that month, he told Reuters, “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
Alter also points to two critical documents that presumably could give Trump broad emergency powers.
One, the National Presidential Security Memorandum (NPSM-7) that, Alter writes, “grants the president broad wartime powers to designate Americans as possible terrorists if the federal government considers them or their sponsors ‘anti-American,’ ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.'”
The second, Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), “which were developed during the Eisenhower Administration as a single instructional book in case of a nuclear attack on Washington.”
Alter continues his war-gamed scenario: “With Mr. Trump now running a police state, former presidents, vice presidents, and Supreme Court justices finally came off the sidelines. On December 22, a hastily-organized Committee on Election Integrity issued an open letter in support of certification of the legitimate winners and filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the president’s use of NPSM-7 and PEAD powers—intended for nuclear war—was unconstitutional in domestic politics.”
Read the entire article here.
Image via Reuters
Political strategist James Carville has a warning for President Donald Trump: be afraid, because everyone is leaking.
Carville responded to a viewer’s remarks about a recent Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan article. The viewer, citing Carville himself, said, “people in the Trump White House are leaking, like, crazy.”
“Don’t trust anybody,” Carville warned. “They got tapes, everybody. They’re — everybody in the administration is s—— all over you, and they’re just getting warmed up.”
“The other effect, come after November, is these people realize that their careers are for all intents and purposes gone,” Carville explained. “No one’s gonna want to hire anybody out of the Trump administration, and the way that you get right with history is start leaking.”
“And you position yourself as the person that tried to tell them,” he warned administration officials. “That’s the only future you have. Leak like a sieve, leak like a broken faucet, leak everywhere.”
“You’re already leaking,” he continued. “Everybody’s leaking on you, everybody’s leaking on everybody else. Trust no one.”
“That’s what, that’s my message to anybody that works in this administration, and if, I’ll give you one piece of advice, Donald Trump, everybody is out for you, even your own people,” Carville said.
“Be scared. Be very afraid.”
It’s unclear which article the viewer was referencing, but Haberman and Swan have a new book about to be released, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”
Axios earlier this week reported, “Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, ‘Regime Change.'”
“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” an administration source told Axios. “And we have no idea which ones.”
Axios also noted that it has heard that “President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts.”
On Thursday, The New York Times reported that Haberman and Swan’s book “reveals a host of details and surprising exchanges as President Trump pushed to drastically expand his power.”
Among them, that the “top echelon of White House officials was fixated on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,” that “Trump wanted revenge against those he felt had wronged him — even when he couldn’t remember their names,” and that “Trump enjoyed comparisons of his power to that of Mao and Genghis Khan.”
Also, the Times noted, one morning White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt found Trump with “a tube of super glue in his hand,” as he “was trying to adorn the marble fireplace mantel with new golden decorations.”
Image via Reuters
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