Mike Waltz Can’t Stop Making Signal Groups

Mike Waltz is a chatty guy. The national security adviser to Donald Trump who accidentally added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a group chat about an attack on Yemen actually has quite a few group chats going, according to Politico. He and his team have reportedly set up at least 20 chats meant to coordinate actions in different different regions across the world.

Politico, citing people who have been added to the group chats (no word on if they were added intentionally or not) says there are chats for officials to work out policy for places like Ukraine, China, and Gaza, as well as regions including the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. The groups, which seemingly operate similarly to the Yemen group that got made public, involve officials and advisors sharing thoughts, including sensitive information, according to those who have seen the chats.

There have been hints that Waltz’s SignalGate situation was likely more far-reaching than it appeared. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Waltz had “created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members,” including chats centered around brokering a lasting peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.

But Politico’s account adds more clarity to just how common these little chats are. One source speaking to the outlet said “Waltz built the entire [National Security Council] communications process on Signal.” This despite the fact that the Pentagon explicitly warning against using Signal, citing concerns that Russian hacking groups can access chats by exploiting a “linked devices” feature that allows users to access their messages on multiple devices.

This revelation of just how reliant Waltz and company are on Signal follows a report earlier this week that his team has also used Gmail, which is not end-to-end encrypted, to discuss sensitive military operations. According to the Washington Post, those emails included details about things like military positions and weapons systems.

So, OPSEC is not exactly strong with this crew, and they’ve done very little to dissuade anyone of the notion that they’re reckless oafs. Waltz, in trying to explain how a journalist got added to a group chat that discussed military operations, claimed that Goldberg got “sucked into” the conversation because he had the number saved under the wrong name (or something like that, it’s not entirely clear what this theory is, there).

Assuming that is true (which, come on), it does seem like a pretty good reason to not organize all your sensitive conversations via Signal group chat so you don’t make those kinds of mistakes. Instead, it seems he’s gone the other way and decided to drive all communications through the platform he thinks can pull random contacts into conversations. That’s a choice, for sure.