Article in The Bukwark by Andrew Egger, 3/27/25
Headline: “The Only Strategy They Know”
“When the Signalgate story broke, we thought to ourselves: Okay, that’s the most politically self-destructive thing the White House will do for a while. But we were wrong. Somehow, the White House’s political response to the story has been even dumber.
“Yesterday, JVL (Joanathan V. Last) took stock of the administration’s clown car of flailing responses: the inexplicable attempt to paint the release of authentic internal screenshots as a ‘hoax,’ the bizarre assertions that the information in the chat wouldn’t have been classified, the attempts to turn the whole thing into a ‘Jeffrey Goldberg sucks and can’t be trusted’ media story.
“Since then, things have gotten sillier still. On Wednesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt scolded the White House press corps for prioritizing the story over news of U.S. business investment or Trump’s latest ‘election integrity’ executive order. JD Vance jeered at Goldberg for declining to publish the name of a CIA officer involved—an action Goldberg took at the request of Trump’s CIA. Donald Trump himself complained that the story was a ‘witch hunt’ and suggested that ‘I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you.’ (All the more reason not to share attack plans on it, then!) . . .”