“Iknow exactly what I’m doing,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced before an impromptu gaggle of reporters in Honolulu on Tuesday. It was one small fusillade in an impressive barrage of White House lies about the Trump national security team’s humiliating and incompetentsharing of plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen on a Signal-app group chat that included Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg. And like all the other prevarications, misdirections, and clumsy ad hominem attacks now emanating from the upper reaches of the American national security state in the wake of the episode inevitably dubbed “Signalgate,” Hegseth’s protest was completely unconvincing.

As Nation contributor John Ganz has noted, any cursory review of the text exchanges that Goldberg first saw and then published reveal Hegseth to be exactly the sort of lickspittle MAGA ideologue he was on his morning Fox News show. At one point in the chat, Hegseth scurried to validate Vice President JD Vance’s America First reservations about the action as a bailout of European powers, with the Truth-Socialesque refrain “it’s PATHETIC.” But when White House adviser Stephen Miller burst into the thread with a reminder of Trump’s rationale for the action—clear the Suez Canal shipping lanes of Houthi interference, and then get European countries to shoulder more of the action’s costs—Hegseth promptly dropped his bluster over Europe’s “freeloading,” and texted a terse “Agree.”

If Hegseth doesn’t know what he’s doing, and has to wait for a Trump-sanctioned mouthpiece to tell him what he thinks, the same goes for the rest of the hapless Signal centurions discussing the imminent attack. The group’s rapid-fire posturing for the most optimally Trump-aligned interpretation of the action showcases just how unserious the arm of government charged with crucial life-and-death decision-making has become under the charge of palliating the great MAGA king. (Indeed, the most revealing element in the whole exchange is what’s left unsaid: Amid all the chat’s MAGA-bro discussions of America’s underappreciated imperial might, there was no passing acknowledgment of prospective civilian casualties in an attack that, per the Yemeni health ministry, has claimed 53 lives.)

What makes the ugly ideological showboating faintly comic, of course, is that Trump himself evinces little interest in the actual impact of his decisions as commander in chief—a distaste that surfaced early in his first term when he swore off the traditional presidential role of appearing at Dover Air Force base to acknowledge the remains of American soldiers killed in action. Hegseth was probably most successful in channeling the outlook of his boss when he declared in the chat that “I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what—nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

The Trump White House still remains a White House, however—which means that all of Hegseth’s prostrations before Trump won’t protect him from the scandal’s fallout. Indeed, his feeble reassurances in Honolulu came just as two other chat participants, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratliffe, threw him under the bus while appearing before Congress. When their questioners heaped skepticism on their claim that the Signal chat hadn’t included any sensitive or classified information, they promptly emended their replies to say that, well, they hadn’t leaked such intel, and it was Hegseth, in any event, who had the authority to determine what was or wasn’t classified in the chat. (Gabbard wouldn’t confirm whether she was indeed included on the chat, but that appears to be yet another clumsy administration lie, since Goldberg has confirmed that she was—and it’s likely why her follow-up House testimony was marginally less unhinged, involving an actual concession that the dipshit handling of the Signal chat was “a mistake.”)

The administration’s inept and untrue talking point that the chat didn’t involve any leak of classified information has created the next major unforced error in White House messaging: the release of the chat’s full transcript, war plans and all, by Jeffrey Goldberg and his Atlantic colleague Shane Harris. (Goldberg is continuing to omit the name of one CIA official in the chat, at Ratcliffe’s request.) Since administration flaks like Gabbard and Ratcliffe keep insisting that no sensitive information surfaced in the chat, the obvious thing to do, Goldberg and Harris wrote, is to release the mostly unredacted exchange and see if they’re right:

The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.

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The forensic question of identifying classified leaks in the chat, and assigning due administrative blame for them, will be what drives the scandal forward in the days and weeks ahead. At another level, though, it’s a secondary point. If Trump’s assorted dimwits had had a more judicious conversation—or even just avoided the incomprehensible error of adding Goldberg into their chat—it wouldn’t have changed the fact that no White House official should be conducting any sort of business on Signal in the first place. For all its claims to heightened security, the app is already a prime target of surveillance from China and Russia—and there’s no doubt that such efforts have exponentially increased in the wake of Goldberg’s story. Indeed, just after the fateful White House group chat took place—but prior to the publication of Goldberg’s piece—the Pentagon issued an advisory to its employees to stay off Signal because “Russian hacking groups” had penetrated it. (All together now: Pete Hegseth knows exactly what he’s doing.)

But since the chat plainly did traffic in classified information, it violated the plain strictures of the Espionage Act, which holds that war planning has to occur under a set of tightly controlled conditions, to prevent hostile surveillance. Meanwhile, the Federal Records Act requires that a permanent account of such deliberations be preserved for the public record—whereas the Signal chat was set by the group’s originator, national security adviser Michael Watz, to disappear in a time frame of between one and four weeks. The watchdog group American Oversight has already filed suit against Waltz, Hegseth, and other chat participants over that breach of the law. That case has been assigned to DC federal judge James Boasberg, who’s the MAGA judicial Moriarty du jour because of his rulings against the Trump White House’s brutally abusive and plainly illegal rendition operation in El Salvador targeting Venezuelan immigrants.

There’s an obvious reason that this administration has been operating on the porous Signal platform, and, as always, it goes back to Maximum Leader Trump. Trump has a well-documented loathing for the practice of paper record keeping, to the point of clogging White House toilets with flushed meeting notes. It bears reminding that his first impeachment (remember that?) occurred after an intelligence officer listened in on his bid to suspend military aid to Ukraine if President Volodymyr Zelensky wouldn’t agree to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings there. And it bears further reminding, of course, that prior to the advent of Trump’s lawless second term, he was facing criminal prosecution for his own operatic violations of the Federal Records Act. Oh, and speaking of Trump’s luxury retreats and war plans, he also brandished a set of documents that, per an amended count in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, included a “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country” before a clutch of guests lacking security clearances at his golfing compound in Bedminster, New Jersey. Among these involuntary agents was GOP PAC director Susie Wiles, who cochaired Trump’s 2024 reelection staff and now serves as his White House chief of staff. Wiles, too, was on the Signal thread about the Yemen bombing—and you can rest assured that she also knew exactly what she was doing.