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SIGNALGATE:  By now, you all know the story: Senior White House and cabinet officials discussed plans for an airstrike on Yemen via the Signal messaging app, and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz mistakenly invited a journalist to the party. (If not, catch up with Spy Talk’s Jeff Stein and Jonathan Broder’s piece on this epic screwup.) 

The operating principle for the Trump administration’s hamfisted response to Signalgate was an old saw of the intelligence trade: Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counteraccusations. "There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal chat,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asserted to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. “It wasn’t classified information,” President Trump said. And so on.

And boy, did that strategy backfire. Accused of propagating a “hoax” and with nobody telling him there were any secrets in the text, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, released the whole thing. Israel was not pleased. Despite what the president and his team were saying, Israel had a secret it expected would be kept, well, secret.