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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who peddles outright lies just as effectively as Trump v1.0 WHPSes Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany, was asked about the Signal scandal yesterday, and declared that "this case has been closed." Not so much, as it turns out.
To start, and you may want to sit down before reading this, it turns out this was not the only time that NSA Mike Waltz used Signal to conduct high-level conversations that were classified and supposed to be secure. Undoubtedly, every reader is shocked—shocked!—to learn that. This is according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal (note: paywalled).
Further, Waltz has enemies within the administration. Some of them dislike his views on foreign policy (he is an old-school Reaganite). Some of them are angry that he embarrassed the administration. Some are anti-Waltz for both reasons. In any event, the anti-Waltz crew, led by J.D. Vance, is seizing this opportunity to press their advantage. They want Donald Trump to cashier Waltz immediately, and to replace him with... presumably some other unqualified crazy person.
Reportedly, Waltz's job security has come down to a fairly simple calculation. On one hand, Trump is absolutely furious with his NSA, both because of the black eye he gave the White House and because it was Jeffrey Goldberg, of all people, who was included in the meeting and broke the story. On the other hand, Trump really, really, really does not want to give a "scalp" (his word, or at least his word as relayed through underlings, off the record) to the media. In particular, he does not want to deliver a career-defining feather for Goldberg's cap.
As a result of the delicate balance between Trump's anger with Waltz and Trump's hatred of the press, the NSA is currently still employed, but is on "shaky ground." We would guess that he will weather this storm, in the short term, but that he'll be shown the door sometime later this year, in a way that it looks like it's coming from Trump alone, and has nothing to do with outsiders or their reporting.
So it's Waltz who is presently in the frying pan, and who is learning whether he'll be dumped into the fire. However, there's another guy who screwed up bigly here, and that is Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. A fair bit of the classified info came from him, and he was also the person in that conversation who had the greatest authority, and greatest responsibility, to put an end to the whole thing, and to redirect to actual, secure channels.
By all indications, Hegseth has avoided much blowback, at least for now. However, there is some reporting that folks in the Pentagon are already weary of the SoD, and of his cavalier attitude toward the DoD's mission. They are upset about the Signal fiasco, they are angry that Hegseth brings his wife to meetings where civilians don't belong, and they are not pleased by his general habit of di**-waving. So, don't be too surprised if Hegseth's position becomes untenable at some point between now and, say, the end of the year. (Z)
