Signalgate’s “Classified” Texts Stump Media

Is Donald Trump now editor-in-chief of national security news?

Signalgate is an embarrassing exercise in ‘Mother, may I?’ journalism, revealing how the government’s convoluted system of secrecy has confused the press about what it can or should publish. The real victim here is the public.

No one involved in the Signal text affair comes out looking good. Not Trump’s top national security officials discussing an imminent U.S. military strike on a public app, outside of the secure channels that taxpayers shelled out billions to set up. 

Not the rest of the government (including Congress) that can’t seem to explain or even understand the basic rules of the secrecy regime it put in place and is supposed to oversee. 

Not Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who explicitly waited for President Trump’s permission to report on the texts, even though the attack on the Houthis had already taken place over a week prior. 

And not the news media overall that showered Goldberg with praise for deferring to the government while propagating the falsehood that publishing what the government deems “classified” is illegal.

This is how our democracy dies: in deference.

Goldberg has said he decided not to publish the actual text messages he received until Trump and his flunkies claimed they weren’t “classified.” In basing his decision on the government’s stamp of approval rather than on clear public interest, Goldberg smells more like a bureaucrat than a journalist.

That’s not to say that he shouldn’t consider whether anything he writes could put Americans (or America) at risk; of course he should. That concern is not meant to protect the government. It is part of a journalist’s basic duty of putting public benefit first. Journalism is not meant to defer to the government, not even about “national security.” We’ve seen enough examples of how the government uses secrecy to hide the unpopular and even the unlawful to know better. 

Whether information is stamped “TOP SECRET” is the government’s business, not journalism’s. 

Journalists holding forth on the importance of complying with the government’s internal classification rules — like officious mall cops who think their plastic badge means something — would be funny if it wasn’t so alarming. 

“Classified” is purely a bureaucratic term, only defined in internal directives and irrelevant to journalism. In fact, the word is defined nowhere in the law. For the media to speak authoritatively about what is and isn’t “classified” makes about as much sense as me weighing in, say, quantum indeterminacy. 

When “classified” is defined by the government, their own explanations are a tangle of contradictory red tape. It all comes down to assertions on the part of the government that damage will be caused (e.g. “serious damage” or “exceptionally grave damage”) when things the state considers secret are divulged. These are rules created to deter and penalize spies who intentionally sell or give secrets to foreign powers. But because the judgment calls regarding harm are so subjective and unprovable when determining what is secret — i.e., what should be secret — the whole regime is brittle and unworkable.

But it has achieved one great side-benefit for the government: It has scared mainstream journalism and succeeded in cutting the public out of any substantive involvement in matters of war and peace. 

These are not merely my interpretations; Goldberg himself says he decided to  publish “because on Tuesday, the president of the United States said there’s nothing classified” in the messages. It’s clear from Goldberg’s comments to the press that he went to great lengths to clear publication with the authorities.

Here’s what he told CBS:

CBS REPORTER:  You published an article on Monday and withheld certain details. You published more on Wednesday. Why did you publish what you published? 

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Because on Tuesday, the president of the United States said there's nothing classified or sensitive in the emails, in the texts. And because various other national security officials said the same thing.

So what we did yesterday was given that information, we went to the agencies — CIA, DOD, DNI, etc. — and said, you guys have said there's nothing classified or dangerous in here. We're just double checking with you. Is there anything that you believe for national security reasons, we should redact?

The CIA asked us to redact something and we did. No other agency asked. The White House spokeswoman gave us a kind of a boring generic kind of, we wish that you wouldn't do this, but you know, that there's nothing, there's nothing classified here. 

Goldberg doesn’t understand that the government’s assertion of “classified” and even “sensitive” doesn’t apply to the public.

In 1940, the Congressional Research Service explains, “President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order authorizing government officials to protect information pertaining to military and naval installations,” adding that “Presidents since that time have continued to set the federal government’s classification standards by executive order …” 

Simply put, classification doesn’t apply to anyone outside the government — not legally it doesn’t. That the press thinks it does says a lot about who they think they work for and the extent to which the U.S. government has become a shadow editor for national security reporting. 

The only law that even comes close to defining what government information should not be made public is the Espionage Act of 1917, which never mentions the word “classified,” instead referring to “national defense information.” 

But over the years, as the national security bureaucracy has grown, as it has become permanent, and as it has come to oversee a permanent state of war, more and more red tape has been created to govern keeping the work of the endless empire secret. In theory, the rules say that means that only “original classification authorities” (e.g., the president, their appointees, the appointees’ designees, and so on) can designate official secrets. But in practice, most everything is “derivative” of other secrets and thus no decisions are actually made.

When it comes to the workings of national security, everything is “classified” in some way, either to prevent another agency from finding out (or even the office next door) or to avoid too much public scrutiny, whether from the budget people or the Inspector General or Congress. 

At the top are the grand pooh-bahs who were caught texting last week. They are so high up on the top of the secrecy pyramid they have an attitude that everything they do is secret.

It should be the other way around. The presumption should be that everything the public needs to be active citizens should be public. If the government thinks that something should be withheld from the public, they should have to make an affirmative decision, constantly. Unfortunately, the major media thinks it should come down on the side of the government, as the Goldberg episode makes clear.

The salient question in Signalgate isn’t if the text messages are “classified.” That, again, is a bureaucratic decision that can only be answered by the original classification authorities. 

The real question is whether the public has a need to know, whether there was any danger in publishing the Signal chat, whether the chattering of Vance and company helped some enemy or actually endangered American lives.

The only question Goldberg should have asked (once the operation had already taken place) is the common sense question of whether the public needed to know how reckless and evasive the top officials were and if their discussion could inform debate about U.S. foreign policy.

Clearly the answer is yes. Even the fact of the existence of the Signal chat is of keen public interest. But Goldberg instead framed the story around the technical question of whether the information he received was “classified.” In making it about him and how eminently Responsible and Patriotic he was to withhold certain texts and even leave the chat voluntarily (!?), the story became about the news media. 

Legally the media doesn’t have to ask the government for permission to publish its secrets, but by introducing the mystique of classification, as if it is some legal test with clear triggers, the government has succeeded at getting the media to cede its editorial authority on when to publish. As a result, reporting on national security matters has become little more than a game of “mother may I?”

The government has often exaggerated the harm caused by leaks of classified information. When WikiLeaks published one of the largest leaks of classified documents in history in 2010 (the Chelsea Manning leaks), the White House said the disclosure “puts at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went even further, calling it “an attack on American interests” that “puts people’s lives in danger” and “threatens our national security…”

But the U.S. government’s own task force convened to assess damage didn’t support the hyperbole. In its report, published in 2017 by BuzzFeed News’ Jason Leopold, the Defense Department-led task force assessed that “there is not any significant ‘strategic impact’ to the release of this information.” Harm, it said, applied more to foreign informants and not U.S. personnel; and also to NSA’s signals intelligence collection methods, a pretty small-bore technical issue (and highly speculative). 

Defense Department-led damage assessment of Manning leak

The same was the case with the famed Pentagon Papers, published some 50 years ago. In the CIA’s damage assessment, now partially declassified, the Agency identified two risks of the disclosure: that it would “adversely affect such officials public or private careers,” and that it could provide “propaganda and political action ammunition” to the North Vietnamese. Nowhere does it describe risks to U.S. personnel or to broader national security

Signalgate has now transformed into a partisan political issue of Republicans versus Democrats. No one has really learned anything lasting from the scandal, not the news media and certainly not the public. The Signal app will continue to be used by the top Trump national security teams, with better vetting of recipients. I can imagine now that the national security state will ask for tax dollars to create their own internal text system for these kinds of internal chats. Several U.S. government agencies have reportedly already reached out to a contractor to bring their own internal communications into compliance with the Federal Records Act.

Wonder what that’s about!

Meanwhile, journalism will continue to refer to “classified” information as if it is above reproach and relevant to their reporting, even though the bureaucratic term should be expunged. “Government secret” is a better description. That conveys what is actually being done, denying information to the public, rather than some black-and-white legalistic rule that cuts the public out of the process. 

For the past year, I have been sharing the complete contents of documents I’ve obtained with the public. Signalgate illustrates better than anything in recent memory why that practice is important. Whenever journalism inserts itself as a middleman in that process and prioritizes the supposed national security interest above the public interest, the press is basically saying it doesn’t work for the public.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I hope you’ll become a paid subscriber so we can show the world, one disclosure at a time, the journalism that works for the public is possible.

— Edited by William M. Arkin