Following Jeffrey Goldberg’s revelation that he was inadvertently added to a group chat for discussing classified war plans, Garrett Graff writes:

Lost amid the headline-grabbing insanity of the classified details is what the principals were discussing on the group chat. It doesn’t take reading too deeply between the lines to see that the principals weren’t entirely clear on what Trump had ordered — someone, apparently Stephen Miller, says, “as I heard it, the president was clear: green light” — which raises some troubling questions about how much White House staff and Cabinet leaders are interpreting or reading the tea leaves on vague presidential directives or desires. When the president of the United States commits US military forces to operations overseas there shouldn’t be any “as I heard it” ambiguity. Moreover, the principals here were having notably pointed policy discussions in the group chat — which, under a normal functioning government, would be handled at the interagency level by staff and sorted out long before it got a point where the vice president and defense secretary are texting back and forth. The idea that the highest-ranking officials of the US government are just texting each other in the same group chat you use with your college roommates from a decade ago should raise dizzying questions about how policy is being thoughtfully decided and road-tested inside the federal government right now. This is what happens when you fill a government with all of the most unqualified people ever to hold their roles — the most unqualified vice president, the most unqualified secretary of defense, the most unqualified director of national intelligence, the most unqualified FBI director, and on and on and on. This will surely not be the last time we see Trump’s “Team of Amateurs” stumble into messes. [Continue reading…]

The NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER added the EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC to a PRINCIPALS COMMITTEE TEXT CHAIN set up for the DEFENSE SECRETARY about PLANNED MILITARY STRIKES.

Here's a thread of involved parties talking about the need for secure communications (when Dems are involved):

— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 1:30 PM