“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth texted to his pals at the highest levels of the Trump administration, just before U.S. forces dropped bombs on Yemen, according to new details released by The Atlantic on Wednesday morning. OPSEC stands for “operational security,” and Hegseth’s assurance was stunningly false, since none of the gang discussing the attack had bothered to question why someone named J.G. (the initials of Jeff Goldberg, the magazine’s editor) was right there in the group chat with them.
The new texts released by The Atlantic make it clear that members of the administration’s highest echelon — including Vice President JD Vance and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director — not only are terrible at operational security but also seem to have a vast disregard for the inconveniences that true security requires. For the past two days, in fact, it has become obvious that the administration’s definition of OPSEC is very different from a regular person’s. To the White House, the term means only one thing: bending reality — by lying, sneering and stonewalling — so that the official narrative of this embarrassment makes an innocent administration the victim of a left-wing media conspiracy.
“This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” wrote Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, on social media Wednesday morning. The Atlantic had conceded, she said, that “these were NOT ‘war plans.’”
The Atlantic conceded no such thing. It used the phrase “attack plans” in its headline, and anyone reading Hegseth’s boastful, frat-boy description of what American service members were about to do can have no doubt that he revealed secret military details. “‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME — also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s),” he wrote. This was roughly half an hour before the first warplanes took off, and a few minutes later he told the group that a group of sea-based Tomahawk missiles had been launched — all invaluable information to an enemy, including the exact time and nature of the attacks. After the assault was over, he told the group that the U.S. had a positive ID of a Houthi leader walking into a building that was bombed.
And yet the White House continued to insist that nothing unusual had happened, as if the sky were blue during a hurricane. “No locations,” wrote Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, who was responsible for inviting Goldberg into the chat. “No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS.” From President Trump to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, everyone insisted that there was nothing classified or even particularly sensitive about the information in the chat, leading Goldberg and his colleagues to reconsider their careful decision on Monday not to publish the military details that Hegseth had texted. Rather than acknowledge the discretion of the editors, White House officials said the newly released texts showed that the magazine had been lying all along. “What scumbags!” wrote Taylor Budowich, the deputy chief of staff.
Normally, the F.B.I. would already be looking into this security breach, but that isn’t going to happen under Trump’s lackey director, Kash Patel, and the White House can probably prevail on congressional Republicans not to conduct hearings or a proper investigation. But what members of the administration can no longer effectively do is pretend that their incompetent and reckless actions didn’t happen. It’s all there in black and white and in childish strong-arm emojis, and history will not be fooled by their cheap attempt to edit the facts.
