(AP Photo/George Walker IV)
After insisting that he did not share war plans in a Signal groupchat — and that no classified information was shared with The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth lashed out at The Atlantic for publishing the concrete and seemingly classified plans to attack Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this month.
On Monday, Goldberg dropped a bombshell report about Trump National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally adding him to a groupchat in which the principals committee – the heads of the top American national security agencies — discussed plans to strike Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this month.
The White House and pro-Trump media figures have since bent over backward to try to defend the massive security breach, which could potentially involve crimes, given the law that Trump enacted during his first administration in response to Hillary Clinton’s email server controversy.
After fits and starts and various attempts at explanations, Trump surrogates eventually landed on their insistence that no classified information was shared with Goldberg. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was defiant in telling a reporter Monday, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”
But a raft of bipartisan analysts have quickly assessed that the very specific details Hegseth shared in a non-secure environment that mistakenly included Goldberg were, in fact, classified, and that the White House-led pushback that this is somehow a hoax does not make any reasonable sense.
It is in this context that Hegseth posted his response on social media, taking yet another page from the “best defense is a good offense” strategic playbook so often used by the Trump administration.
Hegseth wrote:
So, let’s me get this straight. The Atlantic released the so-called “war plans” and those “plans” include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.
Those are some really shitty war plans.
This only proves one thing: Jeff Goldberg has never seen a war plan or an “attack plan” (as he now calls it). Not even close.
Hegseth is being arch in his faux mockery of his own plans to attack, or engage war upon, the Houthi rebels. Reasonable people can look at the details of attack plans to launch missiles and kill dozens of individuals before it actually happens and draw their own conclusions.
The post Pete Hegseth Lashes Out at The Atlantic for Publishing His Own ‘Really Sh*tty,’ ‘So-Called’ War Plans first appeared on Mediaite.
