The Classified Group Chat Heard ’Round the World

Inside the classified group chat that revealed war crimes, perjury, and a president who isn’t running the show.

There’s a moment in every dystopian novel where the reader pauses and thinks: “This is absurd. No government would operate like this.” Then comes Signalgate, and reality one-ups fiction with the most unhinged Slack thread never written.

Last week in just 48 hours, we went from “a journalist was added to a Signal group chat” to “a military strike may have violated the Geneva Convention while top U.S. officials shared classified details on possibly hacked cell phones and lied to Congress about it.”

If this sounds like a deleted scene from Veep, it’s because that show had more safeguards.

But Signalgate isn’t just a scandal. It’s five scandals stacked like Russian nesting dolls of incompetence, deceit, and authoritarian instinct. It’s also a revealing window into Trump 2.0 — not just in terms of governance (or lack thereof), but also who really pulls the strings. Spoiler: It’s not Trump.

Let’s peel back the layers.

Scandal #1: Leaking Classified Military Operations in a Group Chat

This is the no-brainer. If you’ve ever worked in government, or hell, even in HR, you know what not to do in a group text: discuss live war ops with a journalist in the chat.

That’s what happened when national security advisor Mike Waltz added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group with the Secretary of Defense, CIA Director, DNI, and others — and then proceeded to casually drop details about the aircraft, weapons, and timeline of a military strike. In other words: the kind of stuff that’s always classified.

The spin from Trumpworld has been predictably absurd. Pete Hegseth, a human embodiment of a Fox News chyron, ranted about how “nobody was texting war plans” — which would be hilarious if not contradicted by literal screenshots of war plans.

The damage isn’t just theoretical. This kind of info, if intercepted, could get people killed. And it’s not like we don’t have encrypted, secure communication systems for this. They chose Signal. Like frat bros planning a weekend getaway, only the weekend involved drone strikes.

Scandal #2: Lying to Congress Under Oath

Then came the perjury. DNI Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Congress, under oath, that “no classified material” was shared. Hours later, The Atlantic dropped receipts. Either Gabbard and Ratcliffe don’t understand what “classified” means (possible, concerning), or they knew and lied (more likely, even more concerning).

This is the part where democracy breaks down — not with a bang, but with bad-faith testimony in a blandly titled “worldwide threats” hearing. If the intelligence community is now fully captured by political hacks willing to gaslight Congress with a straight face, then the “oversight” part of our government is purely decorative.

This isn’t just about this incident — it’s about the death of accountability. When lying under oath becomes routine, the entire structure of checks and balances rots from within. It’s not a glitch. It’s the operating system.

Scandal #3: Circumventing the Federal Records Act

Waltz didn’t just start the group chat. He set the messages to “disappear” after four weeks. That’s not a bug; that’s intent. You don’t toggle that setting unless you know the chat includes stuff that shouldn’t end up in the National Archives.

This is textbook evasion of the Federal Records Act. And it’s not just a rogue chat — it’s a pattern. Stephen Miller (of course) was on the thread. The same Miller who was allegedly involved in other secretive plans, like rendition flights of detainees to El Salvador. If this is how they discuss Yemen, imagine what’s in the Signal threads we haven’t seen.

Again, remember: Hillary Clinton faced years of congressional hearings over her use of a private email server. And here we have an administration systematically using encrypted apps to talk war crimes — and the media and Congress are mostly shrugging.

Scandal #4: Bring Your Own (Compromised) Device

Let’s talk IT.

Either these guys installed Signal on government devices — a breach of protocol — or worse, they used personal phones. Both are cybersecurity nightmares. The U.S. is currently battling Salt Typhoon, a Chinese cyber-intrusion campaign so pervasive it’s probably monitoring your toaster.

Signal’s encryption is irrelevant if your phone is compromised. Once an adversary owns the device, they own the conversation. And one group member, Steve Witkoff, was literally in Russia during the chat. You’d think someone would say, “Hey, maybe let’s not discuss target coordinates while one of us is in Moscow.”

Oh, and Elon Musk’s Starlink is reportedly blanketing the White House complex now — because why not add some tinfoil seasoning to the national security gumbo?

Scandal #5: Light War Crimes

Finally, let’s get to what might be the most serious and most ignored issue: the content of the strike itself.

The U.S. reportedly bombed a civilian apartment building in Yemen to kill a single Houthi target. Local reports say women and children were killed. The officials in the chat celebrated the hit like they were ordering a successful Uber Eats delivery.

By Geneva Convention standards, this is a war crime. But because it’s part of our “normalized” Global War on Terror 2.0, it barely registers. The actual human cost — the deaths of people with names and families — is just background noise in a chat full of smug insiders and bureaucratic back-patting.

This is America’s foreign policy in 2025: invisible wars, carried out in secret, debated in encrypted threads, sanitized for the domestic audience. Not new. Just more shameless.

Who’s Really Running the Show?

And here’s where the story shifts from scandal to revelation.

From the chat logs, we learn that Trump isn’t actually running things. JD Vance, the Vice President, is powerless. He disagrees with the policy in the chat, gets ignored, and does nothing when national security advisor Mike Waltz stays in his post. In any other administration, that alone would be grounds for resignation.

So who’s really in charge?

Stephen Miller.

He gets added mid-thread, not because of his title (he has none that would require it), but because no one else can “interpret” Trump’s wishes. It’s Miller, not Trump, who gives the go-ahead. Miller, the unelected ideologue, is the shadow president.

This isn’t governance. This is court politics. A cabal of loyalists and fanatics playing Game of Thrones on disappearing messages while the actual president tunes in to Truth Social or naps.

From Banana Republic to Signal Republic

The tragedy of Signalgate is not that it’s shocking — it’s that it isn’t. We’ve grown so used to the erosion of norms, institutions, and accountability that a five-alarm national security disaster unfolds and we’re too numb to process it.

This is worse than anything that’s come before. Not because it’s unprecedented in isolation — each part has a precedent. But because it combines all of them. It’s incompetence, authoritarianism, lawlessness, and indifference to human life all wrapped in a group chat.

The only thing more dangerous than a corrupt regime is a careless one. And right now, the people with their fingers on the button are texting each other like teenagers while foreign adversaries likely watch in real time.

If that doesn’t scare you, check your Signal settings — someone else might already be reading.

That’s the point.