Chris Matthews declared the White House attack plans leak story has moved from “blunder” to “cover up” after the full texts chain including defense officials was published by Jeffrey Goldberg on Wednesday....Matthews worked in the Carter House during the Cold War. He addressed these remarks to a former Republican congressman who was elected in the late twentieth century, and to the daughter of Jimmy Carter's national security adviser.
Matthews said:I believe this story moved from blunder, which it was the last few days, to cover up, and the cover up began almost immediately. We saw the president after coming out of his meeting. We saw last night on Laura Ingraham’s show where Mike Waltz tried to defend himself. She was very good at pushing him and pushing him pretty well, I thought, and have to tell you she’s going to go further tonight after this information. This is classified information. It’s strike zone. It’s about an attack by the United States on the Houthis, a warfront that hadn’t gotten much attention before in this country, but it has now.Matthews recalled his own time working as a speechwriter for late President Jimmy Carter and how national security information would flow and be protected. The former MSNBC host suggested there is more to Goldberg’s number being attached to the call than we know thus far.
He said:There’s two stories. What was Jeffrey Goldberg’s phone number doing in the office of Mike Waltz? Why did they have the phone number? Nobody’s asked this question. What, are they hanging out together? Do they talk occasionally? How come they had the number and how could it find itself into this call list of people? How did that happen? By accident? Accident?! There is no accident here. This happened because somebody did it.
This story broke through because, on foreign policy, the media still has a twentieth-century mindset. For media figures with this mindset, America is the leader of the Free World and the national security apparatus must be protected at all costs.
In this century, that's led the media to make horrible judgments -- cheerleading the Iraq War, for instance -- but this week it means that Signalgate is the most damaging story the second Trump administration has faced, even though it's far from the worst thing the administration has done.
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The media's knee-jerk habits made this a serious scandal, which is good, but it's likely that other knee-jerk media tendencies will end the scandal prematurely. Here's Politico Playbook this morning:
... to be clear: There is no administration in the world — beyond this one — where a blunder of these proportions happens and nobody gets fired or resigns. Not in London. Not in Moscow. Not in Tokyo. Not in Pyongyang. Nowhere....Wow. There it is: the media can’t write about this gaffe forever. After less than 72 hours!
But whatever: Trump’s America is a rare beast indeed, and it is absolutely in the president’s gift to let this pass. The president clearly loves his top team and has his own media echo chamber to help out if he decides it’s all a “hoax.” (Sample chyron on last night’s Fox News: “DEMOCRATS ARE OVERPLAYING THE SIGNAL LEAK.”) Plus — the Houthi mission was indeed a success. U.S. military lives were not lost. And the rest of the media can’t write about this gaffe forever.
The media wrote about Benghazi forever. The media wrote about Hillary Clinton and emails forever. But on this subject, the media is apparently getting restless already.
This is another instinct: to restore the media's preferred level of stasis and equilibrium, where Republicans are on top and the GOP gets away with even its most appalling deeds, while Democrats are the Big Fat Loser party that all normal people hate, although it somehow occasionally wins an election or two.
One set of media instincts made Signalgate a scandal, but this instinct will probably make it a non-story by next week at the latest.
