Minutes before the United States launched a deadly missile campaign in Yemen that reportedly killed 53 people and wounded 89, including multiple children, on March 15, the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was sitting in his car in a grocery store parking lot waiting for the attack.
The story is now well-known and well-memed: Days before the missile barrage, Goldberg was added to a Signal group chat called “Houthi PC small group” after President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, invited him to connect on the encrypted message application. The editor was included in the discussion inadvertently, a spokesperson for the National Security Council acknowledged to the Atlantic.
Why does that mean it’s not signalgate? The name watergate comes from the luxury Watergate hotel in Washington DC where a crime was comitted. Having this conversation on Signal is unquestionably illegal, whether extra people were invited or not, and the scandal is because the conversation being on Signal, not because somebody may have been drunk.
I don’t like using that moniker for the clusterfuck because I feel like it implies something’s wrong with Signal. There’s not. There’s something wrong with the set of drunken shitsacks that used it like complete fucking imbeciles.
There’s nothing wrong with the Watergate or pizza either.
lol true, that’s a totally fair critique of my logic