Weapons Grade Incompetence

For some reason, it got even worse from there... (Update: Holy cow y'all have no idea how bad it is!!!)

A revolving door of drama and chaos (Photo Credit: NewsNation)

Emergency Update: Just hours after the article was published, Wired published a story titled Mike Waltz Left His Venmo Friends List Public.

A Venmo account under the name “Michael Waltz,” carrying a profile photo of the national security adviser and connected to accounts bearing the names of people closely associated with him, was left open to the public until Wednesday afternoon. A WIRED analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz’s personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others—information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends, experts say.

Wired also found the accounts linked to Waltz include those that belong to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and a staffer on the United States National Security Council named Walker Barrett, both appeared in the Houthis PC Group Chat that you can see below. Based on what Wired found, there are so many connections to the top echelons of power and media.

A WIRED review of public data exposed on Venmo accounts associated with senior administration officials suggests that the Signal group chat was not an isolated mistake, but part of a broader pattern of what national security experts describe as reckless behavior by some of the most powerful people in the US government.

The Venmo account under Waltz’s name includes a 328-person friend list. Among them are accounts sharing the names of people closely associated with Waltz, such as Barrett, formerly Waltz’s deputy chief of staff when Waltz was a member of the House of Representatives, and Micah Thomas Ketchel, former chief of staff to Waltz and currently a senior adviser to Waltz and President Donald Trump.

Other accounts carry the names of a wide range of media figures, from on-air personalities like Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade of Fox News and Brianna Keilar and Kristen Holmes of CNN to a cable news producer, a prominent national security reporter, local news anchors, documentarians, and noted conspiracy theorist Ivan Raiklin, who calls himself the “the secretary of retribution” and once created a deep state target list. (Fox News declined to comment; CNN did not respond to a request for comment.)

Many of the accounts appear to belong to local and national politicians and political operatives ranging from US representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas to a former mayor of Deltona, Florida, as well as venture capitalists, defense industry entrepreneurs, and executives like Christian Brose, the president of defense tech giant Anduril. (Crenshaw’s office and Anduril did not respond to requests for comment.)

One of the most notable appears to belong to Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted political advisers. That account’s 182-person friend list includes accounts sharing the names of influential figures like Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, and Hope Hicks, Trump’s former White House communications director.

I’m just lost for words at this point. Anyway, enjoy the rest of the story!

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“Everyone in the White House can agree on one thing: Mike Waltz is a fucking idiot.”

This was a quote from an anonymous White House official published on Politico on the day Jeffery Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, published a story of how he accidentally got added to a Signal group chat that contains top US national security officials, who were discussing war plans to bomb Yemen.

I’ve written the highlights and provided some hot analysis on Tuesday, which you can read below. However, given the non-stop flow of new developments, I had to jump in and give you some juicy details, because it is more amazing than just the initial reporting.

On Monday evening in US time, I left the story with Washington reeling from Goldberg’s revelations of the Signal group chat. After that, things went weird.

The US Senate Intelligence Committee held a hearing on global threats on Tuesday, which the news gods blessed for perfect timing. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were expected to testify, a day after they were implicated in the damning war plan text chain leak to The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg. At the beginning of the hearing, Senate intel chair Tom Cotton remarked that the US intelligence community is “inadequate” in providing the information Congress and the president need to protect the country.

Following that, Democratic senators slammed the intel chiefs over the Signal leak to an evasive John Radcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, with the committee’s top Democrat Mark Kelly scolding that “If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer, and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired.” In addition, ranking member Mark Warner said, “I think this is one more example of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly towards classified information. The Signal fiasco is not a one-off.” Responding to the allegations, the two intelligence officials implicated in the Signal leak claimed no classified information was shared in the group chat.

Meanwhile, in an NBC News interview, Trump voiced confidence in national security advisor Mike Waltz amid a rush to defense by some GOP lawmakers. The president further claimed the leak was an unserious “glitch,” while attacking Goldberg as a “sleazy journalist.” Hours later, Waltz told Fox News he takes “full responsibility” for building and organizing the group chat, and suggested without evidence that Goldberg might have “deliberately” appeared in the chat.

Then on Wednesday, all hell broke loose.

Before intelligence officials like Gabbard and Ratcliffe faced a grilling by members of the House, Jeffery Goldberg and Shane Harris published the full texts from the Signal group chat. Goldberg and Harris noted that Trump administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump, have denied that there is classified information or war plans within the messages.

It then presents the journalists with a dilemma of whether to release the texts or not, but in the end, they decided to release the texts in full.

“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.”

Except for withholding the name of John Ratcliffe’s chief of staff, the Atlantic published the group chat screenshots in full. Contrary to Hegseth’s claim that there “were no war plans,” the chat included full operational details of March 15’s Yemen attack.

Right after Hegseth texted what everyone can tell are freaking WAR PLANS, Hegseth wrote this.

OPSEC is short for operational security. Funny enough, a journalist was in the chat, and nobody noticed him.

After that, the responses were absolutely jaw-dropping.

Other amazing things are happening inside the group chat in the lead-up to the Yemen bombings, including top officials debating whether it is necessary to take military action in the first place, and top government officials texting their points of contact (POCS) to coordinate the administration’s response. If you haven’t checked the Atlantic’s latest story yet, please click on this gift link and enjoy.

If things were not comedically dramatic enough, Judge James Boasberg from the Alien Enemies Act case has been assigned to the Signalgate lawsuit. As House Democrats pounce on the messages to call for Hegseth’s resignation, senior GOP senators broke ranks to call for an investigation regarding the Signal leak scandal alongside Democrats, including asking the White House to expedite a Defense Department review of the group chat.

By evening time in the US, Germany’s DER SPIEGEL dropped the second bombshell. They reported that they found mobile phone numbers, email addresses, and even some passwords belonging to top national security officials.

Private contact details of the most important security advisers to U.S. President Donald Trump can be found on the internet. DER SPIEGEL reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even some passwords belonging to the top officials.

Through commercial people search engines along with hacked customer data, the reporters found private data belonging to National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. In case that isn’t bad enough, it was reported that most of the numbers and emails are still in use, with links to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn, as well as accounts linked to Dropbox, WhatsApp, and Signal.

DER SPIEGEL was able to find some of the contact information for Gabbard, Hegseth and Waltz in commercial databases, while other information was in so-called password leaks, which are hardly a rarity on the internet. One example is the 2019 discovery by Troy Hunt, who found 773 million email addresses and more than 21 million passwords in a hacker forum.

Since then, there have been numerous additional leaks. Criminals are constantly compiling new collections from hacks, usually to sell them on forums.

It should not be lost that it is laughably easy for the journalists at DER SPIEGEL to discover Hegseth’s mobile number and email address, which is found in a commercial provider of contact information. The same applied to Mike Waltz, whose mobile number and email address could be found using the same service provider, as well as in other leaked databases. In this quote, the reporters detailed how they found the Defense Secretary’s private data.

DER SPIEGEL sent the provider a link to Hegseth’s LinkedIn profile and received a Gmail address and a mobile phone number in return, in addition to other information. A search of leaked user data revealed that the email address and, in some cases, even the password associated with it, could be found in over 20 publicly accessible leaks. Using publicly available information, it was possible to verify that the email address was used just a few days ago.

The mobile number provided, meanwhile, led to a WhatsApp account that Hegseth apparently only recently deleted. The profile photo showed a shirtless Hegseth in a baseball cap and necklace. Comparisons with other photos of the U.S. secretary of defense using facial recognition software were able to confirm that the photo on the WhatsApp profile was indeed Hegseth.

Despite Tulsi Gabbard blocking her data in the commercial contact search engines that contained the data of Hegseth and Waltz, her email address was still able to be found on WikiLeaks and Reddit, that leads to an active WhatsApp account and a Signal profile.

When asked by reporters about all of the chaos, Trump dismissed Signalgate by claiming, “I think it's all a witch hunt, that's all. I think it's a witch hunt." As Secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio confirmed he took part in the Signal group chat, he said someone made a “big mistake” by adding the journalist into the conversation.

This inevitably leads to a damning question: Just how incompetent are these people!? If you are an ally of the US, how the hell would you trust America’s intelligence services, at least for this administration? Information passed onto them are so easily leakable to the press, people could literally search the email accounts of the top security officials online! Quoting again from the German newspaper, just to show you how serious this is.

Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles in apps that track running data. There are also WhatsApp profiles for the respective phone numbers and even Signal accounts in some cases.

As such, the reporting has revealed an additional grave, previously unknown security breach at the highest levels in Washington. Hostile intelligence services could use this publicly available data to hack the communications of those affected by installing spyware on their devices. It is thus conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group in which Gabbard, Waltz and Hegseth discussed a military strike.

Another question is how deep will this go? If what we are learning is bad enough, how much more damning information is out there. Setting aside what foreign intelligence services have on Hegseth, Gabbard, and Waltz (Just to name a few), how can we be sure these revelations are the only ones containing damaging information?

Ending with a comedic note, as the White House announced Elon Musk was tapped to help lead an investigation into the Signal chat leak, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee responded by writing: “It must say 'dumb fuckin idiot' written across all our foreheads.”