The Idiocy, It Burns (The Defense Dept)

Update: Oops, halfway through Friday before finding out Steve in Manhattan added this article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Round-Up today. Sorry I didn't clean up more, and the lack of cake...

This is what happens when you put national intelligence under the control of the nation's dumbest idiots (via Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman at NPR):

Embattled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pushed back Tuesday on the latest revelations that he shared military attack plans on his private phone with his wife, brother and personal lawyer...

But the details he shared, two hours before airstrikes hit in Yemen, almost certainly were classified, according to retired Marine Lt. Col. Mick Wagoner, who was a military lawyer for 17 years and deployed to four war zones.

"A launch of an attack there is just no-way, no-how, that an American military operation starting off is going to not be classified for Lord's sake," he said.

And Hegseth's defense also tacitly confirms that he shared those details with people, like his wife, he knew were not authorized to have the information...

This isn't any better than the FIRST TIME Hegseth got caught with loose lips.

According to a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly, after CENTCOM commander General Erik Kurilla sent Hegseth details over secure communications about impending military operations on March 15th, Hegseth shared that information, verbatim, with two separate chat groups on Signal. One was made up of top Trump administration officials — and inadvertently included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. But the other chat group included people with no clear reason for receiving the sensitive information.

"The last time he was wrongly using an insecure communications device, and he mistakenly thought he was speaking only to security clearance holders," said Kevin Carroll, who served 30 years in the Army, then in the CIA and then the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration. Security breaches like what happened in the Signal group chat are called "spillage" by the military, but this is more, says Carroll.

"Here he's knowingly using an insecure communication device and he's knowingly giving classified information to people who are not security clearance holders so it's really more than a spill," Carroll said. "It really gets more to the sort of willfulness that is typically prosecuted by the Department of Justice."

Except the Justice Department - thanks to the corrupt Idiot-in-Chief trump looking to surround himself with lackeys who will never challenge his ineptitude - will never pursue charges because Attorney General Pam Bondi's job is to prevent Boss trump from ever looking bad in public.

Just to get an idea of the severity of the situation that involved Goldberg, go read his article at the Atlantic as long as you can get past the paywall. The one thread woven throughout his description of what he witnessed behind the scenes - through communications intentionally trying to avoid federal guidelines - was how things were under the command of people who didn't know what they were doing, other than that what they DID do was illegal:

I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

Conceivably, Waltz, by 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. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.

All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose...

The only logical reason to go onto Signal to avoid regular channels was to avoid future repercussions of what they were doing, which could fall under war crimes considering they could have bombed civilians in Yemen. And even then trump's staff were all idiotic enough to not verify just who the hell were joined in their "little chats," because they had invited a reporter who had obligations to report the facts of possible wrong-doing.

This is kakistocracy on crystal meth. All of this, not just including unvetted people but also mishandling national security classified documents in ways that get other people thrown in jail. 

Hegseth is out there defending himself from these accusations by how he's the one ending "woke" and DEI measures in the armed forces. All he's doing is highlighting the damage done by mediocre unqualified white guys like himself.

Remember, Hegseth's major qualification that got him the Secretary of Defense job was that he was a talking head pundit on Fox Not-News: Brought on as a "national security expert" during trump's 2016 campaign - the irony, it burns as well - got hired to promote his toxic world-views during trump's first train wreck. Hegseth was someone who agreed with trump that the military should be a tool for violence, and pushed for trump to pardon several soldiers from the Iraqi/Afghani wars of occupation who had committed war crimes against civilians. 

Everything else about Hegseth highlighted how far out of depth he was doing anything else. His own military career was in the National Guard, although during the Iraqi/Afghani occupations that did see him deployed to three tours. His highest rank was major, which is often an office job; and yet here he is ordering generals around (this is like promoting the Assistant Circulation Librarian of a small branch to Head of a County Library System). He supposedly ran two non-profit groups for veterans but both of them shut down while he faced accusations of mismanagement, misogyny, and alcoholism.

This wasn't a guy who was qualified to oversee the largest department in the federal Executive branch. Hegseth is there because he was a media personality who played to trump's vanity, and he's still behaving like a gossiping media insider who doesn't understand the severity of the job and the importance of national security.

Gods help us. THIS is the moran trump is counting out to organize any military operations in the works against Mexico... and Canada... and Panama... and Greenland... and anybody else trump wants to bully and punish into submission.

The entire Defense Department is in chaos right now because they're being led by an idiot more focused on his TV makeup than on overseeing logistics and keeping the generals and admirals in line.

The idiocy is burning but it's going to set fire to the whole nation if not the whole planet.