4 hours ago, toucana said:

It was always a given that other Signal threads of this type would come to light. The buried lede in this case is the recent chaos within the Pentagon that has prompted the disclosure of this latest scandal.

Yes, but that was in the context of official government communication, where the inclusion of an “outsider” was an error. This is so much worse, because there is no circumstance where someone without a clearance and need-to-know (wife, brother, lawyer) should be included, and never on a personal device.

The earlier report should have gotten him fired, and this makes that non-decision look even more horrible.

4 hours ago, swansont said:

Yes, but that was in the context of official government communication, where the inclusion of an “outsider” was an error. This is so much worse, because there is no circumstance where someone without a clearance and need-to-know (wife, brother, lawyer) should be included, and never on a personal device.

The earlier report should have gotten him fired, and this makes that non-decision look even more horrible.

According to this BBC report, president Trump “stands strongly behind Peter Hegseth” and thinks he is  “Doing a great job”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g8r701lrno

Which implies that POTUS is completely satisfied with the performance of his hand-picked muscle-bound, alcoholic  Fox TV mediocrity - complete with his Christo-Fascist Jerusalem Cross and Deus Vult tattoos - in destroying the military leadership of the USA.

Sure, and P Hegseth is firing multiple scape-goats without cause, or investigation, in an attempt to make it look like he'd getting to, and eliminating, the causes of the 'signal-gate' scandal.
Meanwhile he repeats the incident.

Seems to me the stupidity is top-down.
What else would you expect from a TV announcer Secretary of Defense, and a reality show celebrity POTUS.

And JD Vance visits the Pope, who dies shortly thereafter.
Coincidence ? I don't think so.

There’s a suggestion that the recently-fired Pentagon folk were ones that leaked this new story.

And at least part of Trump’s backing is that he will never admit to a mistake. Trump needs a scapegoat, and for Hegseth to resign for some fabricated reason.

President Trump has now fired his National Security Advisor Mike Waltz in the wake of the Signalgate scandal according to multiple press reports.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mike-waltz-alex-wong-nsa-trump-b2743177.html

The former NSA  Mike Waltz and his deputy  Alex Wong will both be leaving their jobs, marking the first cabinet dismissal of the second Trump administration with just over 100 days in office on the clock -   in a manner that echoes the abrupt dismissal of General Mike Flynn as NSA in the first Trump administration back in 2017, after just 22 days in post.

Trump was apparently persuaded to sack Waltz by his unofficial HR advisor  Laura Loomer a conspiracy theorist who seems to have an unusually intimate level of access to POTUS.

"Earlier this month, six officials from the National Security Council were fired after Laura Loomer, a political activist linked to far-right conspiracies, met with Trump and reportedly brought a list of national security officials who couldn’t be trusted."

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5277270-mike-waltz-trump-national-security-adviser/

Yet another  SignalGate scandal has erupted, as described  in a 15m YT video between Andrew Egger of The Bulwark, and Joseph Cox, a journalist from a group called 404.media.co

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4WnMMzoEVs

A few days ago, a Reuters photo-journalist  Evelyn Hockstein  took a photo of NSA Mike Waltz using his smartphone at a White House cabinet meeting (shortly before he was terminated). Enlargement of that image clearly shows Mike Waltz using a modded version of Signal called TeleMessage supplied by an obscure Israeli company.

The point of this mod is that it archives active Signal chat threads by routing them via a TeleMessage server to an archival repository. Presumably this was meant to bring the use of Signal by government officials into compliance with the Federal Records Act - as opposed to allowing the Signal chats to be auto-deleted a few days later.

A hacker connected with 404.media.co who saw these enlarged images became curious about quite how secure this archival TeleMessage relay system was - and broke into it for about 15 minutes. The hacker obtained plain text versions of messages between officials from Customs & Borders, as well as lobbyists for a Crypto-currency company called Galaxy in conversation with government staffers. The hacker also apparently managed to obtain the group names and passwords for other linked government Signal chats.

Telemessage have now shuttered their service.

https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-uses-was-hacked/

Edited May 5May 5 by toucana
corrected "for about 15m"