Wednesday, March 26, 2025

WHITE HOUSE SPIN: PLANS TO KILL PEOPLE AND DESTROY TARGETS WITH BOMBS ARE TOTALLY NOT "WAR PLANS" (updated)

Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic have now pubished the complete Trump administration Signal discussion of the March 15 bombing attack on Houthi targets in Yemen. Goldberg decided to publish this because representatives of the administration insisted on several occasions that nothing in the chat was classified.
On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”
It won't surprise me if the administration now does a 180 and proclaims that Goldberg and The Atlantic leaked secret information and should be prosecuted for that. It won't surprise me if Goldberg actually is prosecuted.

But for now, the White House and its allies are taking a familiar approach to the scandal.

Remember when the Mueller Report was completed and Trump began reciting, like a mantra, one particular two-word phrase -- "no collusion"? Mueller made clear in the report that he did not examine the question of collusion because "collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law." He said his report established that there were multiple contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that Russia sought a Trump victory while the Trump campaign sought Russia's help in the campaign. But the report didn't say there was collusion, in so many words, so Trump repeated (and still repeats) the phrase "no collusion" as often as possible. He's used it 181 times on social media and dozens of times in speeches and interviews.

The key idea Trumpers want us to have in the current scandal is: no war plans.

You see, the headline of the original Goldberg story was "The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans." The headline of the new story is "Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal." The current message from the White House and its propagandists is: Lying LIE-berals said these were "war plans" and now admit they were merely "attack plans."

No, really, that's their big gotcha.


So part of the headline at the Washington Examiner is "White House Pushes Back on ‘War Plans’ Claims." Townhall goes with "Did You Notice What Vanished From The Atlantic's Narrative About the Hegseth Signal Story?"
The Atlantic felt their story was dying. The Trump administration said no classified war plans were discussed in the Signal chat story that’s captured the hyper-regional confines of liberal America. It looks like a nothing burger vis-à-vis a severe breach in classified information....

The hook was that classified war plans were discussed, and [CIA director John] Ratcliffe shot down a claim. There was nothing classified, Jeff, so release the texts. At first, he decided not to do it, simply claiming his detractors were wrong—a typical response when fake news is knowingly peddled.

So, The Atlantic opted to publish the text they felt was classified, though it wasn’t, and two things were clear: these aren’t war plans, and that narrative has conspicuously vanished....

They look like war plans to me, but I'm just a lying LIE-beral, so what do I know?

The most breathless version of this spin -- and probably the one that comes clsest to what the White House wants to see from everyone on the GOP side -- is from Gateway Pundit:
... Jeffrey Goldberg, the leftist anti-Trump editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, claimed without evidence that he was “accidentally” added to a secure Signal group chat by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz where top Trump administration officials discussed sensitive military operations against Iran-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen and called them “war plans.”

... Team Trump angrily fired back and called Goldberg a liar, saying no war plans were discussed. Now, Goldberg and his co-worker Shane Harris have published details of the military plans against the Houthis to call Team Trump’s bluff and humiliate Trump.

... astute TGP readers will note that Goldberg called these details “war plans” to ensure maximum media coverage. He wanted readers to believe he had obtained top-secret military information and was doing the nation a favor by not leaking it.

... Now he is calling the leaks “attack plans.”

... The White House responded to the leak with fire. Also, key staffers noted the far-left outlet’s inadvertent confession, which proved Goldberg helped orchestrate another hoax designed to damage the Trump administration.
To every MAGA voter, this will now be classified as "fake news" and a "hoax," because -- obviously! -- "attack plans" aren't "war plans."

I don't know if they can get anyone outside the base to swallow this. They'll certainly try, and if it doesn't work, they'll move on to something equally dishonest. Anything to avoid admitting that Goldberg's reporting is correct, which, to Trump, would be the unpardonable sin.

*****

UPDATE: The surest sign that they're trying to burn this phrase into our brains? ALL CAPS.

Posted by Steve M. at 12:35 PM 12 Comments
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