Oopsies! Plastered Pete Texted Classified War Plans To A Journalist. Was That Wrong?

From Jeff Tiedrich:

hey, remember when that commie rat-bastard Hillary Clinton ran a private email server? of course you do. it was the crime of the century — front page news on every paper. HILLARY FUCKS UP BIGTIME, the headlines screamed, in thousand-point boldface type. THE EMAIL LADY IS A WITCH. BURN HER! BURN HER!!!

Republicans fell all the fuck over each other in a mad dash to be the first to demand she not just resign, but impale herself on her dagger, immediately.

I mean, what the fuck, Hillary? how could you endanger national security like that?

Republicans, as everyone knows, are careful stewards of America's security. you'd never catch a Republican doing something as foolhardy as, for instance, absconding with dozens of boxes of classified documents, lying about having them, refusing to return them, hiding them, bragging about their contents to golf cronies, waving them in the faces of randos, scrawling to-do lists on them, even sleeping with them — and then stashing them in the unspeakably ugly shitter of their vermin-infested Florida golf motel.

that simply wouldn't happen. that shit's for traitors like the email lady.

you would never catch Republicans doing anything as clownfucklingly insane as texting war plans to each other over a phone app. and you would most certainly never ever, ever, EVER catch one inadvertently including a journalist in such a discussion, because that would be—

oopsies.

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

was that wrong?

because Piss-Drunk Pete has to plead ignorance on this thing. because if anyone had said anything at all to him when he first started at the Department of Defense that that sort of thing was frowned upon…

seriously, check out this Three Stooges level of dipshittery. a couple of weeks ago, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was minding his own business, when out of the clear blue—

I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump's national security adviser.

and then,

Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the "Houthi PC small group."

Goldberg's phone started blowing up with actual fucking war plans.

so, who besides Couchfuck McGee and Piss-Drunk Pete were on this text chain? according to Goldberg, he received messages from Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, Susie Wiles, Scott Bessent, and other sundry Sewer Clowns.

now, the government has its own secure means of communicating internally. there's no need to use third-party messaging apps that are prone to, y'know, facilitating embarrassing fuck-ups. so why do it? over to you, Heather Cox Richardson.

The decision to steer around government systems was possibly an attempt to hide conversations, since the app was set to erase some messages after a week and others after four weeks. By law, government communications must be archived.

so, were any laws broken? of fucking course laws were broken — this is Donny's administration we're talking about here. openly flouting the law is what they do. Heather Cox, please explain it to the nice people.

the use of Signal may also have violated the Espionage Act, which establishes how officials must handle information about the national defense. The app is not approved for national security use, and officials are supposed either to discuss military activity in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, or to use approved government equipment.

and then on top of that, there's that whole we sent classified information to a journalist who didn't have clearance thing.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was fucking steamed, and immediately called for everyone involved to be prosecuted.

"when I'm president of the United States, neither she nor any of these other people are going to be above the law. whether it's her, or Eric Holder, for what he did on Fast and Furious, or any of these other folks. people are going to be held accountable if they broke the laws of this country. nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton."

[taps earpiece] hold on, I'm being informed that this clip isn't from yesterday. it's from January 12, 2016, when Marco was campaigning for president and vowing to throw the email lady in jail.

by the way, it should be stated that — despite the howls of outrage from the entire wingnut media ecosystem — no classified information was ever found on Hillary's server.

so Marco, you were fairly pissed off when Hillary allegedly played fast and loose with her emails, do you have anything at all to say about Donny's entire administration disseminating war plans to a reporter?

we'll take your silence as a no, then.

let's check in with Nosferatu McGoebbels. he's had a lot to say about the email lady over the years.

"One point that doesn't get made enough about Hillary's unsecured server illegally used to conduct state business (obviously created to hide the Clintons' corrupt pay-for-play): foreign adversaries could easily hack classified ops & intel in real time from other side of the globe."

but about today's scandal? no comment from Stephen Miller. he's busy having lunch.

oh, looky here — it's Piss-Drunk Pete himself.

"imagine if it was, I don't know, Donald Trump, what the media would be doing to him right now. eviscerating him. or imagine if it was a member of the military … they still go after these guys for a tiny tiny fraction of what she willfully did."

fortunately, we no longer have to imagine. let's see whether or not media is actually eviscerating Donny right now.

"I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. to me it's a magazine that's going out of business. but I know nothing about it. you're saying that they had what?"

weird how Donny never knows anything about anything. in eighty years we've gone from the buck stops here to why the fuck is should I know what's going on?

watch Donny and the Sewer Clowns sweep this whole thing under the rug — and watch how the media will be too distracted by the inevitable next scandal to follow up on the one that's happening right under their noses today.

(credit where credit is due: props to Bulwark Sarah Longwell, who did the hard work of tracking down all those old tweets and clips.)