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As a result of Mike Waltz’s refusal to admit error and move on, we have been drowned in a series of utterly ridiculous claims from the administration, as well as from Goldberg and other Trump enemies that deserve scrutiny simply because this is one of the most important jobs of a journalist: to sort through claims coming from government and corporate media to discern what is true and what is not.
Then, in the second segment: EU leaders seem to delight in embracing all sorts of tough guy, warmongering rhetoric about how they intend to become a major military power without the U.S. We'll show you the sad and darkly hilarious reality of Europe and the Grand-Canyon-wide gap between their swaggering rhetoric and their impotent reality.
And then finally: Today, that 3-judge Appellate Court issued its ruling and by a 2-1 decision, ordered that the injunction on these deportations to El Salvador remain in place. Even the dissenting judge acknowledged that before you can deport even an illegal alien to El Salvador, they are required to have due process. We'll tell you all about it.
If I'm completely honest – and why wouldn't I be? – I wish I didn't have to talk about this whole Signal-Atlantic-Yemen-war chat scandal. I actually don't think it's particularly significant in and of itself. I think what happened here is very obvious. The Trump administration, particularly Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth – particularly Mike Waltz – was negligent, careless and reckless. I think all of those terms apply when using an unreliable app to talk about extremely sensitive war plans or a bombing campaign that they were about to initiate before its initiation. Mike Waltz accidentally went to include somebody who worked for the government in that group, and by accident chose a reporter, a highly unscrupulous and aggressively anti-Trump reporter named Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic. He accidentally chose his number; his contact was saved in his phone and he put him into the group.
Had Mike Waltz just admitted that had he just said, “Look, […] when I created this group, I thought I was choosing somebody in the Trump administration, instead, I accidentally put Jeffrey Goldberg in the group. It was definitely a mistake. It was a bad mistake. I'm sorry I committed it. I'll be more careful in the future. No harm was done. The operation was a success.” – had he just said the obvious truth, then there'd be nothing else to talk about in this story.
Unfortunately, that's not what Mike Waltz did, therefore, the Trump administration in defending him had to issue a series of statements that are blatantly, almost insultingly, untrue, and a lot of the journalists, including Jeffrey Goldberg, have been making false claims as well.
The whole thing is a tsunami of false claims we do feel compelled now to sort through. When the government issues highly implausible or questionable statements, it's the job of a journalist to question those, to scrutinize those and to point out what we know and what is true.
There's also in the chats that have now been released, including new chats that were released by The Atlantic today, insights into what exactly this bombing campaign in Yemen is entailing, the strategies being used to bomb, who to kill, how many civilians can be killed, and that is at least worth examining probably more so.
Just to remind anybody who has not heard of this story – who's fortunate enough not to have heard of it – it all started yesterday when Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic – again, I think one of the most unscrupulous operatives in all of D.C. media – published this article after the Trump bombing campaign in Yemen resumed.
He revealed and showed screenshots of the chat in which he had been included by Mike Waltz, in an extremely sensitive conversation that, for some reason, took place over the commercial app Signal that everybody uses for free. Even though the government spends billions of dollars developing highly secure encrypted communication for national security discussions, they decided to use Signal – and they accidentally put Jeffrey Goldberg into their planning about how they were going to bomb Yemen, which is obviously a secret: what aircraft they were going to use to bomb Yemen, what time the bombing was going to start, and that's what Jeffrey Goldberg revealed.
This is clearly classified information, highly sensitive, secret information – the government planning a bombing campaign. It's actually illegal to provide that information to someone who's not authorized to receive classified information, which is Jeffrey Goldberg, and yet they did. They did it by accident, presumably, and they should have just said that.
Instead of that, the Trump administration, once Waltz came out and denied that he ever talked to Jeffrey Goldberg, began denying that there was anything sensitive about debating and then planning when to start a bombing campaign in Yemen.
I just want you to think for a second about what would have happened had Jeffrey Goldberg published the entire chat with all of these operational details, before the U.S. going and bombed Yemen. Do you really believe that a single person in the Trump administration would have said, “Oh, that's no big deal that Jeffrey Goldberg published these detailed war plans about when we were going to send our service members in harm's way, what aircraft they would use, what time they would start bombing”?
They would probably charge Jeffrey Goldberg under the Espionage Act and arrest him immediately. At the very least, they would have described this as an incredibly reckless, disloyal, unpatriotic, treasonous thing to do by a reporter because, of course, this information is sensitive. It was only once they realized that Jeffrey Goldberg had it because they gave him access to it that they started to insult your intelligence by trying to tell you there's nothing at all sensitive or classified about any of this information.
Here's Pete Hegseth speaking on Fox News about all this.
Video. Pete Hegseth, Hawaii, Fox News. March 24, 2025.
“Nobody was texting war plans,” he said and this has been the line from the Trump administration: “No, there was nothing in there that's sensitive. No big deal that we shared it with the journalists.”
In fact, I agree with everything Pete Hegseth said about Jeffrey Goldberg. I think he's one of the most fraudulent, if not the most fraudulent operatives in the media. In addition to all the sins Pete Hegseth mentioned, as we've shown you before, it was Jeffrey Goldberg single-handedly, who invented the lie that Saddam Hussein had a close alliance with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to convince Americans of what they needed to be convinced of to support the war in Iraq, which was that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the planning of the 9/11 attack and that's why we had to go in and take him out. Without that lie that Jeffrey Goldberg spread all over the New Yorker and NPR and all the shows that he was asked to come on, he was showered with journalism awards. Without that lie, it would have been much more difficult to convince the Americans to support the war on Iraq.
Needless to say, none of this has affected Jeffrey Goldberg's standing in corporate media because, as I've said before, it's not just tolerated, it is required if you want to advance in corporate media, that you lie on behalf of the U.S. Security State. Nobody does that as eerily or as casually as Jeffrey Goldberg.
Given that I agree with everything Pete Hegseth has said about him, that provokes the question Why is it that Jeffrey Goldberg was included in this very small, 16, 17-people, top national security officials? Why was he included in his group and therefore made aware of the war planning?
It's true that not all of the details of the bombing operation in Yemen were included but a lot of it was.
Here is The Atlantic, which actually was almost forced to reveal more text because Jeffrey Goldberg had said there were details about the operation. The Trump administration vehemently denied it, as you just heard Pete Hegseth do, as others have done, and because the Trump administration said there was nothing classified in there, Jeffrey Goldberg had no excuse to withhold it. Once you call the reporter a liar and claim that what he's claiming is in there really isn't and that there's nothing classified about it, you have no excuse not to publish it. You're basically duty-bound to do so. And he did, under this headline:
At 11:44 a.m. Eastern time, Hegseth posted in the chat, in all caps, “TEAM UPDATE:”
The text beneath this began,
“TIME NOW (1144et): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.” Centcom, or Central Command, is the military’s combatant command for the Middle East.
The Hegseth text continues:
“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
“1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”
The Hegseth text then continued:
“1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
“1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
“1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”
“MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)”
“We are currently clean on OPSEC”—that is, operational security. (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)
I'm sorry, but nobody in good faith, nobody trying to be minimally honest, nobody who is anything other than a complete partisan hack would claim that there was nothing sensitive, nothing classified in what Pete Hegseth posted to the Signal group that included Jeffrey Goldberg. I'm talking about detailed times of an operation that has not yet begun. The targets of the operation, the aircraft they intend to use and the sequence of events that the attack plan entails. The U.S. government classifies everything, pretty much.
I've talked before about how I read through the Snowden archive for two years plus: hundreds of thousands, if not more, top secret and classified documents. They classify everything, including the most banal, ridiculous and routine documents. Here's how you request a vacation and here's how you get a parking credential, top secret or classified.
The idea, the very idea that detailed war plans to secretly bomb a country is not information that ought to be closely held, that it's fine to share it with whoever is just an insult to your intelligence and it is a byproduct of the fact that Mike Waltz decided he won't tell the truth and couldn't tell the truth for reasons we'll get into. So, the administration lined up behind him to defend him and in doing so had to issue some claims that didn't even pass the lab test.
I'm not pretending, and I won't pretend that I'm sitting here worried about whether the government effectively or efficiently protects its secrets. That is not my job. I'm a journalist. If anything, my job is to unearth those secrets, not help the government better hide them. I wouldn't even be talking about this if not for the fact that it's ongoing because the truth just wasn't admitted. Instead, we're getting an avalanche of preposterous claims not just from the government, but from Jeffrey Goldberg as well.
Here is a tweet from Karoline Levitt, the White House Press Secretary, and she essentially followed up with the same sort of denials that Pete Hegseth had that's clearly part of the strategy. She says:
Come on! And they're trying to claim that Jeffrey Goldberg one day said there were war plans and then in The Atlantic was treated as “attack plans.” There's no difference between those. It's just not true that “No ‘war plans’ were discussed” in the Signal chat.”
How is this information not classified?
3. The White House Counsel’s Office has provided guidance on several different platforms for President Trump’s top officials to communicate as safely and efficiently as possible.
As the National Security Council stated, the White House is looking into how Goldberg’s number was inadvertently added to the thread.
Thanks to the strong and decisive leadership of President Trump, and everyone in the group, the Houthi strikes were successful and effective. Terrorists were killed and that’s what matters most to President Trump. (Karoline Leavitt, X. March 25, 2025.)
Trump administration officials for the last two months have been issuing very flamboyant and aggressive statements about the evils of leaking classified information, saying they’ll have zero tolerance and they'll punish anybody who is responsible for it. Suddenly, because of Mike Waltz's careless mistake at best, they shared secret war plans, secret attack and bombing plans with one of the most hostile anti-Trump media operatives on the planet and now they resort to, “Oh, We don't care that much about leaking classified information, we just care that the operation was a success.” It was successful because Jeffrey Goldberg opted not to publish what he had learned before the bombing campaign. But they had no way of guaranteeing that when they let him into that group.
Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director, John Ratcliffe, were testifying before Congress yesterday and both of them took similar positions.
Video. Martin Heinrich, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe. March 25, 2025.
Did you hear that? I mean, whatever you think of the Yemen bombing campaign, however much you love President Trump, here's the CIA director testifying before the Senate. It's not even an effective lie because of course these chats were going to come out. He was asked: Was there anything about timing or weapons packages transmitted in this chat? Obviously, John Ratcliffe, the CIA Director, read the chat. It's right on his phone before going to testify. He knew what was in there and yet he still said, “Not to my knowledge”? I just read you exactly that, the weapons packages that were going to be used and the timing of the attacks in detail.
What is the justification for lying about that? Why would you even do that? That's what I mean: this began as a very trivial matter and it became something more significant because of the refusal to tell the truth and just dig in, in defense of Mike Waltz.
Maybe there is some kind of a semantic game to try to justify those answers, but they are misleading at best. They should have just said, ‘Yes, as we were talking about the operation, we did talk about timing. It was a mistake to include a journalist and period. End of the story. It was a mistake, it was careless, we have to take steps to make sure it won’t happen again.’
Mike Waltz went on Laura Ingraham last night, and I just want to give you this sense of how preposterous this has now become, and how insulting so many of these explanations are.
Laura Ingraham, to her credit, wanted to know how Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number ended up saved in Mike Waltz's phone and why that happened.
Now, I don't know how many of you have used Signal before, but when you open the Signal app, the only people with whom you can start communicating are people who are saved on your phone. You can't just type a random number in. And then, if you create a new Signal group that permits you to speak with multiple Signal users at once, you have to add people to your group and the only options that you have are people whose contacts are saved in your phone.
I understand why Mike Waltz doesn't want to admit that he had Jeffrey Goldberg's number saved in his phone because Jeffrey Goldberg is one of the most dishonest and one of most vehemently anti-Trump media people in all of Washington and Trump, Mike Waltz's boss, harbors a severe hatred for Jeffrey Goldberg. As you saw with Pete Hegseth, Trump has said some more things. They hate Jeffrey Goldberg. So, instead of just admitting that this is what happened, he was too scared to admit that he had Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number saved in his phone.
To Laura Ingraham's credit – and I'm not surprised at all that she did it, she's done it many times before – she quite persistently and adversely questioned Mike Waltz on this very question, I want you to listen to the utter babbling, the preposterous defense, the attempts to justify how this could have happened that came out of Mike Waltz's mouth.
Remember: this is the national security advisor, the person closest to the president on matters of national security, somebody responsible for possessing, analyzing and safeguarding the most sensitive secrets that our government possesses.
Here's his attempt to explain how he had Jeffrey Goldberg's number on his phone.
Video. Mike Waltz, Laura Ingraham, Fox News. March 25, 2025.
Oh, we have to convene all of the greatest technological minds and scientists, the computer experts and security experts from all around the world to investigate how possibly could be the case that Jeffrey Goldberg's contact information and phone number were stored in Mike Waltz's phone, sufficiently to allow Mike Waltz's to put him into the Signal group. And when Laura Ingraham still said, like, okay, given that's the case, Jeffrey Goldberg's phone number and contact information ended up in your phone and it was identified as Jeffrey Goldberg. The graphic in the Signal chat said “JG,” which is Jeffrey Goldberg's initials. And he said, “Oh yeah, yeah, what happens is, like, when this happens, the number gets sucked in. It gets sucked. It's totally what happens like the iPhone, like, oh, yeah. So many times. There are these people who I don't want to talk to, who I'm not supposed to talk to, but my iPhone just sucks in their contact information and their name, and I'm like, oh my God, how did they get in my contacts? How did that happen? How do I have their phone number and their name in my, oh, yeah, the phone sucked it in.” Sucked it from where?”
It's laughable, it's ridiculous, it's insulting that they would continue this preposterous charade.
Here's another image that The Atlantic released today. Jeffrey Goldberg in his original story said that he got an invitation and was added to the chat group by Mike Waltz. Once you hit ‘accept,’ you become part of the group and Signal messages to the entire group.
So, here you see, this is the “Houthi PC small group” and it says: Michael Waltz added you to the group.
This is Jeffrey Goldberg's phone. There were only 19 members. It was intended to be a small group talking about the Houthi operation. And there is the first message where Mike Waltz says:
Team-establishing a principles group for coordination on Houthis, particularly over the next 72 hours. My deputy Alex Wong is pulling together a tiger team at deputies/agency Chief of Staff level following up from the meeting. (March 11, 2025.)
I heard a lot of Trump supporters trying to pin the blame on his assistant or his staffer, Alex Wong. Mike Waltz is willing to say anything to defend himself, you just saw that, but he's not willing to falsely blame Alex Wong. Why anyway, if you're the National Security Advisor, would you be handing out your phone, your personal telephone to staffers and they have access to it? That's not something a national security adviser should be doing. If that were the explanation, that might even be worse, more reckless. But that's not what happened. It says right here: “Mike Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg to the group” and, again, the only way you could do that is if you have Jeffrey Goldberg's number saved in your phone.
Mike Waltz has been insisting from the beginning, “I don't know Jeffrey Goldberg, I've never met him, I've ever talked to him.” Here is a photo from October 2021 that people dug up. It's from the French philosopher and warmonger, Bernard-Henri Lévy. On October 29, 2021, he tweeted:
I don't know, maybe you stood next to somebody on a stage before, and even though you work in the same area – Jeffrey Goldberg is a National Security Reporter, Mike Waltz is a member of Congress, who works in national security and is very well known in D.C, he has been around forever. There you see the two of them and up close. Maybe actually just didn't talk to him. He never remembered this. It's a total coincidence that the person whose contact and number are saved in your phone is somebody that you were about three inches from in a small group meeting on a stage. But the other side of it is it important to realize who Jeffrey Goldberg is.
The New York Post published a headline saying “Trump team accidentally added lefty editor to secret text group planning Yemen raids. OPERATION OVERSHARE” (New York Post. March 25, 2025.)
The idea that Jeffrey Goldberg is a “lefty” is so funny. Jeffrey Goldberg is an American who left college to join a foreign military – you'll never guess which country, never! Take one guess. Yeah, exactly: he went and joined the IDF. He worked as a prison guard in an Israeli IDF prison that detained Palestinians with no due process during the first Intifada. It's notorious for being abusive. He talked about abuses that he saw and helped cover up, he wrote a book about his experience. So, he joined the IDF and then he became one of the loudest advocates of War in Iraq, He was at the New Yorker in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002.
Video. Jeffrey Goldberg, C-SPAN. October 22, 2002.
That would mean that Saddam Hussein probably played a role in 9/11 but unfortunately, it was a complete lie.
There was a time, for those of you who don't remember or were too young to have lived through it, that they were constantly leaking, that Muhammad Adda, one of the lead hijackers for the 9/11 attack, met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague – very similar to what Russiagate was. They just make up lies based on whatever the needs are.
Remember they had all kinds of claims from the Steele dossier about close Trump associates going and meeting with the Russians in Prague. Same kind of modus operandi, same kind of lie.
In any reasonably healthy society, this would have destroyed Jeffrey Goldberg's career. That he lied the country into a devastating war that took the lives of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands, if not more, Iraqis. That even Tony Blair, an advocate of this war, says is what gave rise to ISIS because of the instability in the vacuum that we created. This was a major destruction of American credibility, of American lives, of American treasure.
Americans wanted to support wars against the people who did 9/11. This was a year after 9/11. That's what they wanted. Jeffrey Goldberg happily stepped forward and provided that false link, was showered with a journalism award for this incredible investigation and it didn't impede his career at all. It helped his career.
So, it's not a surprise that Jeffrey Goldberg, himself, on the other side of the story is also lying. He went on The Bulwark, the Never Trump website, which is where he belongs, and spoke to lifelong GOP operative turned Democratic cheerleader Tim Miller. Yesterday, Tim Miller was pressuring him: “You need to release this and show that it's actually in there.” Jeff Goldberg was very reluctant to do so. Listen to him explaining why he didn't think he could or should.
Video. Jeffrey Goldberg, Tim Miller, The Bulwark. March 25, 2025.
That is a complete lie. The person who works for John Ratcliffe and manages his team is not an undercover agent. An undercover agent is someone deployed in a field, say, Lebanon or Syria, pretending to be a store clerk or a weapons dealer, who, in reality, is someone who works for the CIA. And if you identify them as a CIA agent, you blow their cover and that puts them in danger. It would be incredibly irresponsible for John Ratcliffe to have put the name of a CIA undercover operative in this chat. Even among 17 people doing that is reckless; that's the thing you guard the most. Jeffrey Goldberg, however, to try to justify why this is so grave and why he cannot release any more information, just fabricated on the spot that there was a CIA undercover operative who was named in the chat.
The Atlantic itself admits that that's not true:
A CIA spokesperson asked us to withhold the name of John Ratcliffe's chief of staff, which Ratcliffe had shared in the Signal chain, because CIA intelligence officers are traditionally not publicly identified. Ratcliffe had testified earlier yesterday that the officer is not undercover and said it was "completely appropriate" to share their name in the Signal conversation. We will continue to withhold the name of the officer. Otherwise, the messages are unredacted. (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)
Now, about the war itself. We had gone over some of these excerpts on Monday, and when talking about whether they should bomb Yemen, JD Vance was the only person in the chat who raised objections to it. He called it, “a mistake.” He said, “Look, if this is what your decision is, I won't object publicly” but he noted that there was very little American interest in the Suez Canal. Maybe 3% of the trade in the Suez Canal is American, whereas 30% to 40%, he says, is European, if anything, this matters to Europe and Egypt, but not to the U.S. Obviously, it benefits Israel as well as Tom Cotton said, because the Houthis have been bombing Israel and threatening to seize their ships and so, JD Vance said, “We're supposed to be America First foreign policy. Why are we going to bombing campaigns and wars again to salvage the interest of other people?”
But he wasn't the only one who said that. The other person who talked about some hesitation was the former congressional candidate, the Green Beret, whose wife was killed working for the CIA in Syria in the battle with ISIS, Joe Kent, whom Tulsi Gabbard has now chosen as her chief of staff or her deputy. He said: “There is nothing time-sensitive driving the timeline. We’ll have the exact same options in a month. […] (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.) So, there was an added voice of caution or at least pushback and hesitation on this Yemen bombing plan and that was Tulsi Gabbard's Chief of Staff, Joe Kent.
There was a segment of these chats that were about the bombing campaign itself that happened not before the bombing campaign, but as the first strikes happened. And it started with Mike Waltz saying,
At 1:48 p.m., Waltz sent the following text, containing real-time intelligence about conditions at an attack site, apparently in Sanaa: “VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID. Pete, Kurilla, the IC, amazing job.”
Waltz was referring here to Hegseth; General Michael E. Kurilla, the commander of Central Command; and the intelligence community, or IC. […] (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)
But JD Vance didn't understand the message from Waltz. It was just written in a very incoherent way. So, JD Vance said, “What?” and then Mike Waltz responded this way:
At 2 p.m., Waltz [wrote]: “Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”
Vance responded a minute later: “Excellent.”
Thirty-five minutes after that, Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wrote, “A good start,” which Waltz followed with a text containing a fist emoji, an American flag emoji, and a fire emoji. (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)
I just want to highlight this, that this is what the Yemin bombing campaign entailed to start. They identified someone that they claimed was a top-missile person for the Houthis. They didn't kill him in his car, they didn't kill him on a battlefield. They waited for him to enter a residential building filled with civilians, including his girlfriend and the way they killed him was by collapsing the entire building.
On that first day, there were many claims of civilian deaths – unsurprisingly, given that these were the rules of engagement.
Is that something that you think is a legitimate military strategy to find somebody that is in your view a legitimate target and just blow up whatever building they're in regardless of how many civilians you kill? If during the Iraq War, the Iraqis had identified where a military commander lived, and he lived in some 47-floor high-rise apartment in Chicago, would the Iraqis have had the right to just blow up the entire building and say “Well, there was one guy in there who was a legitimate target”?
You blow up an apartment and you kill 37 American civilians along with one member of the military but, of course, when we do it, it's not terrorism. Somehow it becomes legitimate. But if that's what this bombing campaign is, collapsing residential buildings to take out some mid-level missile person – or their top missile person even – who will just get replaced very easily as happened throughout the entire War on Terror – “Hey, we got Number 3 of al-Qaeda again because they just kept getting replenished.” That's how the War on Terror went on and on – this is the kind of endless war posture that Trump said he wanted to avoid.
Not only is Trump doing exactly what Joe Biden did, bombing Yemen, and what Barack Obama did as well, when he worked with the Saudis for a full-on war with Houthi, just endless war in the Middle East, but he's loosened the rules of engagement so that the military is free to blow up entire residential apartment buildings as long as one person that they want to kill is in there, not caring in the slightest about how many civilians or children or whoever happens to be, unfortunately, have the misfortune of being in that apartment building when it's “collapsed”.
So, a lot is going on in this story, most of it is quite ugly and unnecessary, eroding our credibility for absolutely no reason. The most significant part by far is the fact that we now have another war in the Middle East that is not going to stop.
Just to remind you, the Houthis were attacking U.S. ships when Biden was bombing them and when Trump said that the bombing campaign was unnecessary. Once there was a cease-fire in Gaza that Trump and his envoy were able to facilitate, the Houthis stopped attacking ships. They only restarted attacking ships once in their view and everyone in the international community agrees that this happened once the Israelis started blocking the humanitarian aid that the cease-fire called for – food, medicine, water – into Gaza. They said because Israel is not abiding by the cease-fire agreement, we're only going to attack Israel-flagged or Israel-owned ships.
So, they're not even attacking American ships anymore, just Israel's and that is what prompted Trump after saying last year that he opposed restarting Biden's war and escalating it and clearly killing a ton of civilians as usual.
Then, at some point, we'll be attacked and everybody will walk around saying, “Oh my god what did we do? Why did they hate us?” And I think that has to be the focus once this question of how Jeffrey Goldberg got into the chat is resolved and we can move on from that. This is what our focus ought to be.
One of the most bizarre things to watch over the last several years ever since the Russian invasion, in February 2022, in Ukraine, is watching Europeans, European officials in Brussels and bureaucrats start acting like they're refighting World War II or fighting World War III against Russia. You have German leaders talking about sending tanks for the third time in the last 100 years eastward toward Russia, which they ultimately did. You have German leaders in outdoor rallies saying, “We must defeat Russia, we must take them down.” You have all these tiny little countries and their tiny little prime ministers turn out like with a million people in the entire country acting like they're Winston Churchill.
Ever since the pronouncements by Donald Trump – about his intentions to say, “We're not going to keep paying for your defense, Europe. Why would we pay for your defense? You offer this very ample welfare state to your people and they love it and that's understandable. They get a lot of benefits, but why are our workers paying for your defense? You're not impoverished. You're perfectly capable of doing it yourself.” – they've gone completely insane, acting like, “OK, now we're going to become this military superpower we were always meant to be, without the United States.”
The problem is Europe is a joke militarily. They're an absolute joke. France and the U.K. have a small nuclear arsenal, so that makes them serious on that level, but in terms of conventional military fighting, they're laughable. In fact, in that Signal chat group that we just went over, because JD Vance was saying, Mike Waltz said:
[From Mike Waltz] Whether we pull the plug or not today European navies do not have the capability to defend against the types of sophisticated, antiship, cruise missiles, and drones the Houthis are now using. So whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes. Per the president’s request we are working with DOD and State to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans. (The Atlantic. March 26, 2025.)
So, according to Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, Europe doesn't even have the military capability to fight the Houthis. Their navy is insufficient. The Houthis have more sophisticated weaponry and more fighting capability than the Europeans, who nonetheless have been walking around beating their chest, “We're Europe, we're going to build our own military, we are going to fight Russia, we're going to defeat them, consign them to the ash heap of history, we don't need the United States.”
All of that rhetoric is about three weeks old and already Europe is confronting the reality that they're Europe and that none of that tough talk is possible. Even The New York Times is mocking them now:
Most of the European countries are struggling greatly with their economy. Their populations hate them. There's massive anti-establishment sentiment throughout Western Europe and even in Central Europe. It's the reason why people in the U.K. voted to leave the EU with Brexit because they didn't want to be governed by these kinds of people in Brussels. It's a reason why right-wing populist parties that countries never thought would succeed – in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and many more places – are gaining in popularity because they're channeling this anti-establishment sentiment. And none of these Europeans want to give up the massive state benefits that they get, which is a crucial part of being European: one-month vacation and tons of time off for paternity and maternity leave, retiring early, working four days, not working a 40-hour workweek. These are all things essential to the Europeans and they’re not going to give that up to build a massive military and go into massive debt for it, especially when a lot of these countries like France are already in enormous amounts of debt.
Yet, here is Ursula von der Leyen, a warmonger and a German who nobody elected to become the president of the EU other than the members of the European Parliament, on March 4, talking tough about her rearmament plan.
Video. Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission. March 4, 2025.
She said Europe is ready to rearm and build its defense. They're not. One of the ironies of all of this is that the most strident warmongers in Europe are women politicians who are on the center-left, the center of European politics. The reason I say it's ironic is that the most belligerent, aggressive, and warmongering party of Europe when it comes to Ukraine and Russia, Israel and a variety of other potential wars, is the German Green Party, whose figurehead is Annalena Baerbock, who is the foreign minister of Germany.
The German Greens ran on a platform that elevated her and the Greens to the parliament. They ran on the platform with what they called a feminist foreign policy. They said, “Our party is dominated by women, we're going to have female officials in the most important offices, and because women are more inclined to resolve disputes through diplomacy and conciliation and not with war and aggression, a feminist foreign policy is less antagonistic, less belligerent.” That's the campaign they ran on.
I personally find this kind of essentializing – men are more aggressive and inclined to war; women are more conciliatory – to be extremely reductive. And obviously you can use that same reasoning, not to elevate women, but to demean them: “Oh, women are more emotional, men are more rational, women don't belong in possession of power, etc.” That's the same exact kind of thinking. But for whatever reason, the most unhinged voices who practically think they're at war with Russia and are ready to build up this military are women politicians in Europe, on the center and center-left.
One of them, Kaja Kallas, the former prime minister of the crucial state of Estonia, all one million people who live there, has become so deranged that she's even starting to genuinely disturb a lot of European officials, including many who are for the war in Ukraine, but are very alarmed by the way she's speaking.
Here's Politico EU today:
Imagine the Prime Minister of Estonia saying, “We're now the leaders of the free world, not the United States.
Most countries don’t want to inflame things with the United States,” said a sixth diplomat. “Saying the free world needs a new leader just isn’t what most leaders wanted to put out there.” (Politico EU. March 26, 2025.)
Just to give you the kind of rhetoric this person uses, this Kaja Kallas person, here she is at the annual conference at the European Defense Agency in January, addressing the fact that there are EU members like Hungary that don't support this foreign policy, that don’t want to confront Russia, that want to try to put an end diplomatically to the war in Ukraine. And here's the kind of language she used against them:
Video. Kaja Kallas, EU Council. March 6, 2025.
Believing that Ukraine can win the war, meaning, expelling all Russian troops from every inch of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, requires madness at this point. But what does she care? She's from a tiny little country that will contribute nothing. She's demanding that workers in Italy, Spain, France and Germany pay for the glories of this war that she wants. I get why Estonians don't like Russians. I understand the history of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, but she has to face reality and she wants to be this glamorous, strong, Churchillian war leader, but the EU doesn't have anywhere near the capability to back up those words.
Here is Kaja Kallas in May of last year at a different conference.
Video. Kaja Kallas, Lennart Meri Conference. May 18, 2024.
She's talking about regime change in Russia, changing the government of Russia and then breaking Russia up into a bunch of little different pieces. That's the foreign minister of the EU engaging in utterly deranged, fairytale thinking.
Here is the prime minister of Finland, Mette Frederiksen. And here's how she's speaking.
Video. Mette Frederiksen, DR News. March 5, 2025.
The reason these people live in a fantasy world is because they've had the United States financing, arming and fighting their wars for them for so many decades. So, they've gotten to simultaneously talk tough as though they're fighting wars because they contribute some troops, while at the same time not having to spend any of their people's money on it and giving them a welfare state that you could afford to give if you're not spending massive amounts in the military the way the United States has been doing.
But now, they're having to face the reality that the United States is not going to continue to pay the military-industrial complex to defend Europe and fight its wars for it. Why should the United States do so? And so, they still want to talk this tough talk, but the reality is they don't have the political will nor the resources nor anything resembling a serious military to back it up. I mean, as I said, Michael Waltz said in that Signal group from a couple of days ago, “They can't even fight the Houthis. They don't have the military sophistication or the navies to battle Yemen.”
And we're seeing now that there's just zero willingness to back up any of this rhetoric. It was like when the British Prime Minister wanted to be all Churchillian, the British are obsessed with being Churchill, Sir Keir Starmer, and he said, “We're going to go and send our troops to Ukraine to keep the peace there and prevent Russia from advancing.” And then the next day, he had to come out and admit, “Actually, we can't do anything without U.S. air cover. So, we're just saying that if the U.S. is willing to go to war in Ukraine against Russia, then we will, but we can't do it without the U.S.” And that's the reality of what and who Europe is, including the U.K.
I just want to show you one bizarre article that came out today that gives you a sense of just how far gone the Europeans are in terms of the unreality in which they're living. It's from the Financial Times:
EU calls for households to stockpile 72 hours of food amid war risks
“New realities require a new level of preparedness in Europe,” said commission president Ursula von der Leyen. “Our citizens, our member states and our businesses need the right tools to act both to prevent crises and to react swiftly when a disaster hits.” (Financial Times. March 26, 2025.)
So, even as every country around her tells this unelected person that they can't fund this massive military rearmament that she envisions – they won't go into greater debt for it; their populations won't tolerate it – she's basically now telling European citizens, you're in a war. You have to stock up and make sure you have 72 hours' worth of food because she envisions that Europe is at war with Russia.
This is how they think and while I'm very critical of things the Trump administration has done in the first two months of the presidency, one of which we're about to get to, others of which involve censorship, the resumption of the war in Ukraine, the continuation of the destruction of Gaza, Trump is making progress in facilitating a peace deal with Russia and Ukraine. And on some level, you can make the argument that in terms of world security and given the utter insanity of how the Europeans are thinking and speaking, there may be nothing more important than putting an end to this war diplomatically, which Trump ran on a promise of doing, the American people want, and Trump has now made significant strives in achieving.
We reported previously last week on the controversy surrounding the fact that the Trump administration during the campaign promised to mass deport people in the United States illegally. Deportation typically means, in fact always means, picking people up who are in your country illegally and sending them back to their country of origin. They get a very quick hearing in a, basically quasi-court, a deportation court inside the Justice Department, and as long as the government can show they don't have the legal papers to be in the United States, and the person can't show they have the illegal documents, the deportation is approved, and they get sent back to their home country.
The Trump administration is doing some of that, not nearly at the level promised, but they're doing some of it. However, they're doing something much, much different, which is that they're picking people up, primarily Venezuelans, up until now, and they're not sending them back to Venezuela. They're sending them to a third country that these people have nothing to do with, that they're not citizens of, that in most if not all cases, they've never visited, which is El Salvador.
The United States government is paying the government of El Salvador not to accept them, but to incarcerate them in one of the most horrific prisons that exist in the world, to film them being humiliated and dehumanized, all based on the accusation that the Trump administration refuses to prove that these people are members of a violent gang, Tren de Aragua, based on invocation of war powers that has only been used three times previously, in actual wars, the war of 1812, World War I, World War II, but even then, the people who were ordered under the Alien Enemies Act to be deported got a hearing.
The Trump administration is sending these people, including people who have obviously compelling cases that they're not part of this gang, that they've been mistaken for gang members, just like the U.S. told us during Guantánamo, the War on Terror, that only the worst of the worst was there and it turned out many of the people there had nothing to do with terrorism. They were innocent, they were a part of a mistaken identity, any number of reasons why. That's what happens when you don't give people due process, you imprison people unjustly.
A federal district court judge ordered this to stop and no detainees to be delivered to El Salvador without first getting a hearing. The Trump administration rushed to move them there, brought 237 of them there, refused to turn the plane around and a lot of Trump supporters have been complaining, “Oh, this is just a single federal judge. Who is he to order the president to stop some policy based on his belief that it's unconstitutional or illegal?” – even though as we showed you on Monday night that's how our system works.
Conservatives have often got injunctions from single district court judges to stop Biden policy, to stop Obama policy, to stop Clinton policy. But the DOJ appealed that injunction. So, it's not before just a single district judge now. It's before the U.S. Court of Appeals, which is the highest appellate court in the country, which is right below the Supreme Court in terms of prestige. They held an oral argument on Monday, and we played a lot of that for you or some of it in which we showed you how antagonistic, how adversarial, how aggressive the judges on the panel were being toward the Trump Justice Department's arguments about why they have the legal authority to do this, making it quite clear that it's extremely likely that the appellate court would uphold that injunction, so that now it's not just a single federal court judge, it's the most prestigious appellant court in the country, right below the Supreme Court, that's doing so.
The three judges were an Obama appointee, a George H.W. Bush appointee and a Trump appointee and the decision that they issued today was a 2-1 decision that upheld this injunction that the federal district court issued for the Trump administration not to deport anyone else back to El Salvador, at least not without hearings.
Even the judge in dissent, the Trump judge, emphasizes that every single illegal alien, people inside the United States illegally that the Trump administration proposes to send to a prison in a foreign country, has a right to a habeas corpus hearing, to an opportunity to prove that he's being unjustly accused. The only reason he dissented was he said that the case should have been brought where they were detained and not in Washington. But on the substance of whether they have a due process rate, the dissenting judge agreed that it was essentially 3-0 on that question.
[…]
What's interesting is the Trump-appointed judge, Judge Walker, did dissent but as I said, he dissented mostly on the grounds of where the case was brought. He said it shouldn't have been brought in Washington, but in Texas, you have to bring it where the people are detained, not where the government officials are. In his dissent, he said this:
[WALKER DISSENT]
The two sides of this case agree on very little. But what is
at this point uncontested is that “individuals identified as alien
enemies . . . may challenge that status in a habeas petition.” (US Court of Appeals. March 26, 2025.)
If the Trump administration wants to do mass deportation – they convinced Americans to vote for that and polls show people favor that – if they were deporting people back to their home country, none of this would be an issue. But when you change that to something far more radical, sending people, based on interpretations of their tattoos or the flimsiest evidence that you haven't even presented to a court, and you accuse people of being violent criminals and send them to a prison designed to be one of the worst and most destructive and humiliating and dehumanizing prisons in the entire world – the El Salvadorian government has said they may never leave, they may be here for life – not just basic human rights, but our Constitution, our laws, our precedents, as all three judges agreed, including the Trump-appointed judge, require that they be given an opportunity to contest the charges against them – this should not even be controversial.
It has become such because if you sufficiently dehumanize people, and this is what we saw in the world War on Terror, if the government just labels them terrorists without proving it, even if it's wrong, enough people will say, “Oh, these people are animals; they're not even humans, they deserve no rights; kill them, torture them, kidnap them, put them in prison for life. They don't need a trial.” That is always what the founders feared most: that the government would raise the fear level sufficiently so that people would give away their own liberties.
Remember, Benjamin Franklin and this is not apocryphal, this is documented, when he left the constitutional convention, he was asked by a woman, “What is it that you did in there?” And he said, “We created a republic if you can keep it”, knowing that the biggest danger to the Bill of Rights would be that citizens, the population, would be manipulated or fearmongered into giving up those rights. And that's what typically happens. We see this all the time, and that's why it's happening now.
Now, the appellate court, it's not just one judge, it's a three-judge appellant court, has ruled that doing this without a hearing, or even invoking the law to justify it, is likely to fail on the merits, and therefore these deportations are still enjoined, not by one judge, but by a three-judge panel.
