There’s a funny flashback scene in the 1980 comedy classic “Airplane,” in which Ted Striker tells Elaine Dickinson about a mission he’s poised to join.
“My orders came through,” he tells her. “My squadron ships out tomorrow. We’re bombing the storage depots at Daiquiri at 1800 hours. We’re coming in from the north, below their radar.” When Dickinson asks when he’ll be back, Striker replies, “I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.”
The scene keeps coming to mind as the White House’s “Signalgate” scandal becomes even more serious. NBC News reported:
The Atlantic on Wednesday published a transcript of text messages showing that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth detailed U.S. military attack plans in Yemen in a Signal group chat that inadvertently included the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. In an article titled “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal,” Goldberg quoted from texts in which Hegseth specified types of U.S. military aircraft and the timing of recent airstrikes against Houthi militias in Yemen.
By now, the basic elements of the controversy are probably familiar. Top members of Donald Trump’s national security team chatted in a Signal group over the sensitive details of a military strike in Yemen — potentially in violation of some federal laws — and they accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, in their chat.
When Goldberg published his original bombshell report on Monday, however, the journalist, as part of an attempt to be responsible and cautious, deliberately withheld information to avoid publishing potentially classified details.
A day later, both the president and top members of his national security team insisted that the Signal group chat did not include classified information. The comments were practically an invitation to Goldberg to publish everything he had.
And so, he did.
In the process, the generation’s most scandalous White House security breach managed to get even worse.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for example, sounding a bit like the fictional Ted Striker, wrote precise details about the take-off times of U.S. fighter jets, as well as details about the kind of jets, as they prepared to strike Houthi fighters in Yemen. At one point, the former Fox News personality literally wrote, “1415 … THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP.”
Though the messages did not include specific targeting locations, it included information that, if obtained by bad actors, could have endangered American pilots’ lives and possibly allowed U.S. targets to evade the strikes.
The beleaguered Pentagon chief did all of this while boasting, “We are currently clean on OPSEC,” referring to operational security that was anything but “clean.” Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor and former special counsel at the Pentagon, noted via Bluesky, “I worked at the Pentagon. If information like this is not classified, nothing is.” But Hegseth is hardly alone in looking worse. The day before these new revelations reached the public, Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico specifically asked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, “Precise operational issues were not part of this conversation?” Gabbard, who was under oath, replied, “Correct.” As for the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote via social media that she now considers the entire controversy to be a “hoax,” despite everything the public has now learned. On Monday, some were concerned that this stunning White House debacle would be a one-day story. Those fears have now disappeared.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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