Friday News Roundup
Last week, the next to last bullet in my newsletter was about a missile strike in Yemen that left 53 dead. Little did I know that story would be connected to the biggest scandal this week.
A Deep Dive Into Signalgate
If you haven’t heard by now, the term “Signalgate” or “Signalghazi” refers to the scandal that ensued after Trump Administration officials accidentally let in journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to a secret text chat on the Signal app that discussed the bombing of Islamist Houthi movement targets in Yemen.
The first thing to keep in mind is that the bombing probably killed at least several dozen civilians. According to the transcript of the chat published by the Atlantic, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz texted, “The first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s apartment and it’s now collapsed.”
The identification of the Houthi missile expert was made possible by an anonymous Israeli spy (euphemistically referred to as a “human source”). By letting Jeffrey Goldberg into the group chat, Michael Waltz placed a spy’s life at risk for the sake of bragging.
Days before the Signal chat leak, a security memo from the Pentagon warned that Department of Defense employees should not use the Signal app, because it was being targeted by Russian hacking groups for phishing attacks.
According to a recent Substack exclusive, IT security professionals in the Department of Defense were overruled and ordered by political appointees in the Trump Administration to install Signal on the phones of DoD senior leaders in violation of the DoD’s own information security regulations. As early as February this year, Katie Arrington, the Trump Administration’s Chief Information Security Office at DoD, issued waivers that allowed each of the military services to deploy Signal on official government devices.
The chat also included Joe Kent, an acting chief of staff standing in for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, despite Kent not being confirmed by the U.S. Senate or announced publicly about his position. Kent has several ties to white nationalists, including an interview he did with a pro-Nazi blogger. Kent, who had previously for Congress as a Republican, had also collaborated with white nationalist Nick Fuentes on his social media strategy.
Conspicuous by his absence on the call was President Donald Trump. Has he become President Bystander while unelected MAGA extremists do the hands-on work implementing his will?
Disappearing the Opponents of the Regime
While Mahmoud Khalil fights the Trump Administration’s kidnapping and placement of him in a Louisiana prison, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts, Rumyesa Ozturk, was kidnapped off the street by masked ICE agents dressed in black who refused to identify themselves. According to this article in the Tufts campus newspaper, Ozturk was targeted by Trump and ICE solely for co-authoring an editorial in the student newspaper that favored having Tufts divest from Israel (linked here). Sources at Tufts identified the website Canary Mission as responsible for getting ICE to target Ozturk. According to a white paper by the Middle Eastern Studies Association of North America, Canary Mission is an anonymous group associated with the Israeli far right that views any criticism of Israel or Zionism to be the equivalent of material for support for terrorism. My guess is that the Trump Administration agrees with Canary Mission’s definition of anti-Israel speech as a form of terrorism. I cannot otherwise explain why the Trump has still refused to specify any crime that Khalil or Ozturk has committed.
The Trump Administration started attacking immigrants who engage in anti-Zionist or anti-Israel speech first, because they can split the Democratic coalition on pro-Israel vs. pro-Palestinian lines. But they won’t stop there. The Administration has already moved from targeting pro-Palestinian immigrants to attacking targets who would even more sympathetic to the general public, but burying the news so we don’t know about it.
For example, Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist working as a bioinformatics expert at Harvard Medical School, has been placed in immigration detention after customs officials at Logan Airport stopped her for having samples of frog embryos in her luggage. Petrova had previously left Russia because of her outspoken antiwar views in opposition to Russia’s war on Ukraine. By sending her back to Putin’s Russia, Trump is almost assuredly ensuring that she will become a political prisoner when she gets back to the country. By attacking pro-Palestinians immigrants, Trump creates a precedent for sending Russian dissidents back into Putin’s jails.
Foreign Affairs News
Over 100,000 Israelis protested in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other cities to demand that Hamas and the Israeli government come to an agreement to release all remaining hostages. In some respects, it feels like Israelis are given more of a right to protest against Israel than Americans are allowed now. Meanwhile, in Gaza, thousands of Palestinian men have participated in the largest anti-Hamas protest since the beginning of the war.
U.S. allies Japan and South Korea are currently preparing for trilateral talks with China in order to deal with shared challenges, such as aging populations and joint defense against North Korea.
Recently defeated prime minister of Greenland, Mute B. Egede, denounced JD and Usha Vance’s planned visit to the country as “highly aggressive.”
Trump announced a 25% tariff on all cars imported to the United States. Japan demanded an exemption from the tariffs, while Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney denounced the tariffs as a “direct attack.” Trump claims the tariffs are necessary to bring back American auto manufacturing, but General Motors is the company that takes the biggest hit from the Trump tariffs, which means classic American brands like Chevy, Buick, and Cadillac could experience major price increases.