Only Connect

CNN:

Now The Atlantic is publishing this on theatlantic.com because Trump and his aides have said that none of this is classified," Stelter continued. "That has been the main defense from the Trump White House in the past two days, that these text messages were a mistake, Goldberg never should have seen them, but nothing was classified, nobody was in any danger. That's the argument we've heard advanced, [and] because of that argument Goldberg went back to his colleagues and talked with his lawyers at The Atlantic, and they decided to go ahead and publish the text messages that they had originally withheld. Remember, Goldberg withheld some of this information because he thought it could risk national security, because it could have put U.S. military members in harm's way. So now he's decided to go ahead and publish the full, unredacted text message chain with one with one omission. He is still withholding the name of a CIA employee because the CIA has asked him to do so, so that is notable. There still is something in these messages that is considered so sensitive that The Atlantic is choosing not to publish it."

"But the headline here is that defense secretary Pete Hegseth did send detailed descriptions of the military strike in Yemen to this group ahead of time," Stelter added. "Goldberg was able to read this, these messages, ahead of time. He looked at it and didn't know if it was real or not, but then he looked on social media and saw that the bombs were beginning to fall in Yemen. People can read this for themselves on The Atlantic website, but what you see in Hegseth message, the key message here is from defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and he specifically specifies the timing for the attack, the first wave, the second wave, which military fighters were going to be used, and exactly what would happen when. So again, if that's not classified information, honestly, I don't know what is."

Russia, Russia, Russia:

Not really, not the way that this journalist has been accused of doing it," said Cluley, co-host of the "Smashing Security" podcast. "Now you get invited to a chat group, so someone who's already in it adds you to a chat group. But once that has happened, of course, the messages are being sent to someone's phone, so if their phones are hacked, then their messages could be read in the future. So Signal is what we call an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, which means in transit, the messages are encrypted, but once they reach the phone, obviously they're decrypted because otherwise you wouldn't be able to read them yourself."

At least one of the participants, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, was overseas during the discussion, which Cluley said could have exposed the deliberations to foreign adversaries.

"Obviously if they had the opportunity, they absolutely would have done [it]," Cluley said. "But why would you expose yourself to that kind of risk? I mean, there are government-approved secure messaging systems where these sort of communications should be happening. You shouldn't be using an off-the-rack messaging service. You shouldn't be using Snapchat, you shouldn't be using WhatsApp, you shouldn't be using Signal if you are communicating at this kind of level about this kind of serious thing."

Oh, the Russians had the opportunity:

Meiselas: Steve Witkoff, was allegedly in Moscow while he was on this group chat. Do you believe the Russians now have all of that information and potentially more?

[Susan] Rice: Well, yes—the Russians have whatever Witkoff was doing or saying on his personal cell phone. There should never have been a Signal chat used as the vehicle for a discussion involving anything sensitive regarding national security. The Russians undoubtedly have it.

But like Trump says, no harm, no foul. Right?