Oh: They Sent Jeffrey Goldberg ATTACK PLANS, not WAR PLANS

It's all fine, everyone

From left: National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

***Hey there! I’ll probably do another installment of I Might Be Wrong Komedy Klass next week. I still have a lot of great stuff that people sent in for the first installment, but I’m refreshing the call for people to send their comedy anything — a written piece, a standup clip, whatever — to KomedyKlass@imightbewrong.org. I’ll pick one piece to be the focal point of our discussion. And it’s fine to send a second thing if you already sent something — you won’t be violating some etiquette that will increase your already-pretty-intense social isolation.

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It’s been an incredible few days since we learned that Trump administration officials added The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg to what should have been a highly-secure group chat. The White House and its allies have employed a series of ridiculous arguments in their defense, including that the whole thing is a hoax and that it’s actually a 4-D chess masterstroke that will make Talleyrand’s ghost weep when Trump executes the final move. And yesterday, National “Security” Adviser Michael Waltz floated the possibility that Goldberg might be a psychic cyberterrorist with possible shapeshifting capabilities:

Yeah: DID GOLDBERG TYPE HIS NUMBER INTO WALTZ’ PHONE DELIBERATELY??? He might have — he could have anticipated the existence of this group chat months, years, or possibly decades in advance, and also known the name of someone who would be invited to the chat. He might have then accessed Waltz’ phone, possibly by posing as a Verizon employee or by lowering himself from the ceiling like in Mission Impossible. Try to recall, Mr. Waltz: Have you ever given your wife your phone — possibly so she could “find that photo from yesterday” or something — but not looked closely to be sure that it was actually her? How do we know that your “wife” wasn’t actually Jeff Goldberg in a wig? FACT: We don’t know. And that’s just the type of stunt that this “loser” journalist would pull.

A key part of the White House’s argument is that Goldberg didn’t see anything important. And because Goldberg initially only described parts of the chat instead of publishing them, Trump’s allies accused Goldberg of exaggerating the unpublished material. On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified that the chat contained no classified material:

Gabbard might be trying to squeeze through a loophole the size of a nanoparticle. Because documents don’t receive classification status in real time — a CIA operative composing a message for a contact doesn’t have to write “Meet (classified) me (classified) at (classified) midnight (classified).” But just because a document hasn’t yet received classification status doesn’t mean that the information it contains isn’t classified. If true, that would be nuts — a foreign operative could yoink a document off the CIA director’s desk, post it on Instagram, and all we could say is “Darn, nice job. We really need to be faster with the big, red ‘CLASSIFIED’ stamp next time.”

Yesterday, The Atlantic called the administration’s bluff by publishing portions of the exchange that it previously omitted. The most damning bit is below, and let’s take a second to recognize the weirdness of a conversation between the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Adviser, and the Vice President being reprinted on a blog written by a comedian best known for writing in the voice of a Russian porn bot.

If the “chef’s kiss” emoji did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it in response to that JD Vance “What?” Truly, JD, from the bottom of my heart:

But the more consequential part of the exchange is Hegseth’s description of the strike. It clearly contradicts statements by Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe that the chat did not — “to their knowledge” — include information about “weapons packages, targets, or timing.” To me, when the Secretary of Defense writes “THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP” in all caps, I interpret that as a subtle reference to time. Also, Gabbard and Ratcliffe made their statements to Congress, and lying to Congress is a crime, and I would expect there to be consequences if Congress wasn’t a living monument to cowardice hell bent on fast-tracking its own irrelevance.

Hard evidence of the Secretary of Defense sending details of an upcoming attack to a civilian journalist would elicit a mea culpa from most administrations. But this White House employed semantic pedantry that would embarrass Bill “What Does ‘Is’ Mean?” Clinton in order to argue that the release vindicates their position. Here’s Pete Hegseth relaying the official White House line:

Oh…”attack plans”, not “war plans”! Totally different! And attack plans — as everyone knows — are totally fine to accidentally send to random members of the media! As are battle plans, raid plans, onslaught plans, and assault arrangements. You see, “war” is a term of art that applies to a narrow range of clearly identifiable circumstances, like when you need to provide a legal justification for deporting Venezuelans without due process.

Now, I’m just a dumbass comedian with no military experience, but that might actually make me the perfect test subject for the experiment that I’m about to conduct. Because if I can think of ways that this information might be useful to terrorists, then surely someone who’s not a soft-handed laptop jockey could figure it out. And it seems to me that what Hegseth wrote might be strategically useful to terrorists because:

• The Houthis could fortify their positions and make sure that all hands were on deck;

• The “target terrorist” who is “at his location” could move;

• The Houthis would know exactly what type of attack to prepare for;

• The post-strike specifics about the target’s whereabouts would indicate what level of intelligence on Houthi leaders exists and possibly therefore what methods had been used to collect that intelligence;

• They’d know that JD Vance is even more of a spiteful little twerp than suspected.

Yesterday, I wrote that we had crossed an event horizon of arguments that are only believed by complete idiots. Today, we are deep in the black hole, being crushed by forces unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. I can’t believe that adults even attempt stuff like this, just as I can’t believe that grown men and women have decided that career advancement is worth this level of humiliation. I would blow a goat at the Super Bowl halftime show before I’d lean into a microphone and try to sell people on the “attack versus war” distinction. Trump administration officials, however, seem to be fine with this sub-goat-blowing level of indignity. But that doesn’t mean that any of the rest of us have to be.

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