Originally published at: Trump May Be Having Regrets About Mike Waltz—For More Than One Reason - TPM – Talking Points Memo
Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz is obviously having a bad week, having made a mistake that was not very national-security-adviser of him. Trump has maintained that he has confidence in Waltz publicly, though reporting on what happened behind the scenes suggests he has lingering suspicions about the top adviser. So while Waltz appears to…
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Rooting for Josh Weil (D) to win this special election!! If he does win the GOP majority in the House is then one seat
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And now Trump himself is stepping in to help campaign for the party’s lackluster candidate. Trump is expected to be the special speaker at a virtual town hall for Fine and Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis tonight. Patronis is running for Matt Gaetz’s old seat, so Trump is actually stepping in to deal with the problem he created by appointing two House Republicans to positions within his administration while the party navigates its razor-thin majority in the House. That appears to be part of the calculus behind the administration’s decision to pull Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-NY) nomination to be United Nations ambassador, as my colleague Josh Marshall outlines here.
Turns out the FO part is less fun than the FA.
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Will Jeffries become the next speaker of the House?
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Trump has maintained that he has confidence in Waltz publicly, though reporting on what happened behind the scenes suggests he has lingering suspicions about the top adviser.
National Security Advisor?
Didn’t Donnie have problems with the first guy in that position during his first administration?
Since there couldn’t be any questions about his judgement, it’s surely some really bad luck.
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The under oath testimony of the Trump administration folks before Congress is stunning for many reasons, including:
1. Most of them consistently lied over and over and over again. They were (and are) afraid to tell the truth.
2. They put their lack of professionalism, inexperience, immaturity, and bad judgment on full display.
3. They demonstrated their arrogant, foolish self-preservation and their grotesque sycophancy to draft dodger Trump over the national interest.
4. They played semantic games and were evasive.
5. They paraded their inability to accept responsibility and fear of retribution from Trump in front of the whole nation.
6. Following Trump’s lead in everything, they played the blame game.
7. They proudly put up for scrutiny their lack of ethics, morals, and fidelity to the law and operational policy/procedures.
8. Not ONE of them modeled an iota of strength of character.
9. They showed contempt for and condescending to the voting public.
10. They set a horrible example for the nation’s youth.
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Is she lying or gaslighting and does it matter? It’s always one or the other and it always minimally means abrogation of sworn duty (and usually something worse).
I leave it to others to speculate on why anyone at DOJ would feel it appropriate to comment on the success of a military operation in another country much less moralize it was a more important topic.
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So Trump is not happy with Waltz because he had a journalist’s phone number in his contacts but divulging classified information on Signal and potentially putting members of the armed forces at risk is OK?. I suppose this is good to know. And what about Hegseth, who’s deranged responses to questions about him testing classified information is just dandy?
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Now there’s this gem from msnbcnews…
The White House, the Republican Party and their MAGA media mouthpieces think the American people are idiots.
… … …
Some are idiots. Most are not.
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Trump nominated the nastiest and dumbest @$$holes that he could find, to own the the libs, and force submission from GOP Senators. The problem now is that he has to live with them, and boy they dumb and shifty. They are good at kissing ass though.
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And, as they’ve quickly shown, none of them have the background to know the protocols involved in doing the job.
Seriously, did anyone on that chat even question whether it was OK to send sensitive national defense information through lines of dubious security?
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Everyone who gets put in a position that involves handling classified information is told, explicitly and at length, the proper way to handle that information.
Everyone on that chat 100% knew that this was not an approved way to share sensitive operational information. They also knew that other, more secure, channels were at their disposal.
And yet, they chose to use Signal instead.
If there is a plausible reason to do so that is not “we wanted to evade the official recordkeeping requirements,” I’d love to hear it.
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Oddly no one involved with “Signalgate” has yet been arrested or in any real way been held to account for risking lives of our troops by basically broadcasting their military sttack intentions on Yemen in an almost public forum.
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That was reason #1.
#2 They knew the app was compromised, and used it after being told that it was.
I have said for years that drumph is a russian asset. Witness the current destruction of our country. Mission accomplished.
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Not to worry. I’m sure they’re planning on arresting Jeffrey Goldberg sooner or later.
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Not only was the app being actively exploited by Russians, but one of the chat participants was actually in Moscow at the time.
With all of that, it would honestly surprise me if Russian intel was not following along in real time.
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I can’t think of a reason that they did it that would be much better than that and there are a lot that would be worse (e.g., “Those rules weren’t meant for me.”)
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Steve Witkoff claimed he left his personal phone at home and had only his official government phone, which complies with security protocols, with him in Russia. The Signal app supposedly can not be installed on government phones. Since then, however, it has come out that rule was changed.
The consensus seems to be that everyone in the chat was using Signal on a personal phone, but it would be interesting to know if the official phone Witkoff had with him in Russia had the Signal app on it.
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