Trump’s Own Intel Official Just Blew up His Mass Deportation Excuse

The head of the CIA undermined the president’s excuse to enact the Alien Enemies Act during a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday.

“To invoke this law, the president must demonstrate that the United States is under invasion by a foreign nation or government,” Representative Joaquin Castro said. “They have alleged that we are under invasion by the Venezuelan government.”

“The idea that we are at war with Venezuela would come as a surprise to most Americans,” he continued. “You would think our nation being at war would merit at least a small reference in [a] threat assessment. Director Ratcliffe, does the intelligence community assess that we are currently at war or being invaded by the nation of Venezuela?”

“We have no assessment that says that,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe responded.

Earlier this month, the White House made a spontaneous decision to defy a court order by deporting more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador by invoking the Japanese internment-era wartime policy.

Five of the men sued the Trump administration in response, attempting to prevent their “imminent removal.” But even after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered that the immigrants should remain in the U.S. as they await trial, Trump officials thwarted the law and sent them skybound regardless. Donald Trump justified the infraction by claiming Venezuelan immigration into the country constituted an “invasion,” and described the current era as a “time of war.” The men were taken to a notorious El Salvador prison known as CECOT.

The Trump administration pledged that every man it had deported to CECOT was a member of Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization, but family members and friends of the deportees claimed that’s not true. Some of the men that had been forced to board the planes had no criminal record.

On Tuesday, a U.S. circuit judge purported that the Trump administration’s actions were wildly unprecedented, and that the nation’s current use of the Alien Enemies Act was treating asylum-seekers worse than it treated actual German Nazis during World War II.

Donald Trump’s administration is desperately trying to spin the release of classified information by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by pretending like there is any meaningful difference between “war plans” and “attack plans.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich leapt on a new report from The Atlantic Wednesday, detailing sensitive information Hegseth sent in the now infamous group chat that Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg had previously omitted from his initial reporting on the high-level conversation to which he was accidentally privy. 

But Budowich wasn’t concerned about the obvious threat to national security—he was mad about The Atlantic’s headline: “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal.”

“The Atlantic has already abandoned their bullshit ‘war plans’ narrative, and in releasing the full chat, they concede they LIED to perpetuate yet ANOTHER hoax on the American people,” Budowich wrote on X Wednesday. “What scumbags!”

It seems that The Atlantic’s first headline had used the phrase “war plans” to describe the sensitive discussion about when bombs would drop on a foreign country, instead of “attack plans.” 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also attempted to make a mountain out of a molehill in a post on X. 

“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans.’ This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” she said. 

Leavitt is in a bit of trouble now, because she had insisted that there had been no discussion of war plans and no classified information shared in the Signal group chat. The Atlantic’s reporting Wednesday confirmed that this was not true. According to the office of the director of national intelligence’s guidance on classification, “information providing indication or advance warning that the U.S. or its allies are preparing an attack,” is considered top secret. 

Hegseth inadvertently provided information on the strikes to a journalist a full two hours before the strikes took place because he—like the other members of the chat—was too sloppy to check the list of chat members before spouting off about the plans. 

The clear messaging pivot to focus on “war plans” versus “attack plans” suggests that the Trump administration can no longer back up its central, arguably more important, claim that no classified information was shared in the group chat. A claim that has since proven resoundingly false.

Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who was reportedly the administrator of the Signal chat and added Goldberg to the discussion, also posted on X Wednesday.

“No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS,” he wrote. “Foreign partners had already been notified that strikes were imminent. BOTTOM LINE:  President Trump is protecting America and our interests.”

Trump officials made an obvious critical error when they accidentally added a journalist earlier this month to a Signal group chat discussing the specifics of an imminent attack on Houthi targets in Yemen. But they made another profound mistake by potentially inadvertently sharing the details of the battle plan with one of America’s longest adversaries.

The Trump administration’s Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff was in Russia when he was added to the chat on the retail app, a mistake that intelligence experts say basically hand-delivered news of the attack to the Kremlin hours before it took place.

“The Russians have whatever Witkoff was doing or saying on his personal cell phone,” former national security adviser Susan Rice told MeidasTouch Tuesday. “There should never have been a Signal chat used as the vehicle for a discussion involving anything sensitive regarding national security. The Russians undoubtedly have it.”

The Atlantic, whose editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg witnessed the chat unfold first-hand, released uncensored screenshots of the Signal exchange Wednesday morning after several top Trump officials disparaged the outlet, insisting that the attack details were not confidential.

Some of those details included down-to-the-minute scheduling for the launch of U.S. F-18 attack planes toward Yemen, “trigger based” strikes, and the launch of sea-based subsonic cruise missiles.

It also included some of America’s top officials reacting to news of the airstrikes with fire, fist, and American flag emojis.

The monumental slip-up was a horrific omen for U.S. national security, whose weakest link is apparently a crew of Cabinet members who can’t accomplish the basic due diligence of double-checking who they’re adding to a group chat hosted by a private company.

The Trump administration has offered conflicting excuses to sidestep The Atlantic’s report, including claiming that the chat never happened (despite a National Security Council spokesperson that confirmed its existence). The admin changed its tune Wednesday after the release of screenshots from the chat, with National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—who created the chat and added Greenberg—claiming that the story was false because it didn’t include weapons (it did), methods (again, it did), and what he described as “war plans.”

“BOTTOM LINE: President Trump is protecting America and our interests,” Waltz wrote.

The federal judge Trump currently hates the most (an ever-changing list) will now preside over the Signalgate lawsuit.

Judge James Boasberg has been making headlines after blocking the Trump administration’s invocation of the wartime 1798 Alien Enemies Act to carry out indiscriminate, extrajudicial deportations of people he claimed were Tren de Agua members to El Salvador.

The Trump administration ignored Boasberg’s order on the shoddy grounds that it was spoken aloud and not yet written, and the planes took off. When Boasberg ordered the planes to turn around, Salvadoran autocrat Nayib Bukele celebrated along with members of the Trump team. On March 15, Boasberg hit back, levying a restraining order against the Trump administration, blocking them from carrying out anymore deportations using the Alien Enemies Act’s wartime powers. Days later, Boasberg is still demanding more information on the deportations, and Trump continues to deny him.

Now, Boasberg will be at the bench to oversee the Trump administration’s most massive gaffe to date.

“You really can’t script this,” wrote Politico’s Kyle Cheney after Wednesday’s news that Boasberg will rule on the Signalgate lawsuit. “The same week the Trump admin invokes the state secrets privilege to deny Boasberg info, he is assigned the lawsuit over the Trump administration’s apparent carelessness with state secrets.”

Trump officials were sued Tuesday by the government watchdog American Oversight Tuesday after reports that The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal group chat in which multiple cabinet members and Vice President JD Vance were discussing an attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The administration has denied that anything classified was discussed and Trump himself blamed it on someone who worked at a “lower level.” Now, the judge he’s been battling with will be shedding even more light on the embarrassment.

Trump has yet to comment on Boasberg’s new post, but his Truth Social post from the midst of the Alien Enemies Act battle certainly give us some insight into how he may feel about this:

“This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President - He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!” Trump wrote of Boasberg on Truth Social on March 18. “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!! WE DON’T WANT VICIOUS, VIOLENT, AND DEMENTED CRIMINALS, MANY OF THEM DERANGED MURDERERS, IN OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Having to deal with Boasberg again will surely add more fuel to his hatred for what he thinks are “activist” judges.

As Trump continues to cut federal programs used by millions of Americans, he proposed financially compensating the MAGA loyalists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In an interview with Newsmax Tuesday, host Greg Kelly asked Trump if there’s any talk of a “compensation fund” for prosecuted January 6 rioters, because they lost “opportunity” and “income.”

“Well there’s talk about that, we have a lot of people talking about it, a lot of the people that are in government now talk about it, because a lot of people in government really like that group of people,” Trump responded, referring to the rioters as “patriots” who went to the Capitol “peacefully and patriotically.”

Upon taking office, Trump issued a sweeping pardon for some 1,500 people who tried to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.

“These people are incredible people; they were treated so unfairly, so horribly,” Trump said of the insurrectionists.

The January 6 attack caused an estimated $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol, and more than 140 police officers were injured—a stat line well deserving of payment, according to the president. Only a small portion of court-ordered restitution payments have been made by offenders to offset the costs of repairs, according to ABC News.

Trump specifically mentioned “big MAGA fan” Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force Veteran who was fatally shot by a police officer during the attack. He called the officer, who is still employed, a “disgrace.”

The president claimed that no other group in history has been treated as badly as January 6 rioters. “The judges, the system, the hatred, the vitriol, the prosecutors, the way they wanted to destroy these people,” Trump said. Rich, coming from the man who is weaponizing those same mechanisms to unlawfully detain and deport thousands of immigrants.

Americans are rallying behind Democrats—even in deep Trump territory.

In a major upset, Democrat James Malone usurped a seat in Pennsylvania’s state Senate in a special election, flipping a district that had voted for Donald Trump by more than 15 points mere months ago. Malone previously served as the mayor of East Petersburg and will succeed Republican Senator Ryan Aument, who resigned from the office in December to serve as a state director for Senator Dave McCormick.

“I’m very excited and really, really happy that all the work we put in has paid off,” Malone told WGAL-TV.

“Everyday voters are not liking what they’re seeing at the federal level; they don’t like the chaos. We want to be sure that we, as Pennsylvania, are standing up for our neighbors and are standing up for our state,” Malone continued. “And brotherly love is Pennsylvania, and that just proved out. Kindness over criticism, right? So that’s what we’re trying to do, and I think that that really is what we’re looking at, moving forward.”

Malone’s victory followed another Democratic win Tuesday in the Keystone State, after Dan Goughnour won a House seat, maintaining a Democratic stronghold in Pennsylvania’s lower chamber.

The wins were roundly celebrated by the larger Democratic Party, which saw its voters excoriate their inaction on a GOP budget resolution that promised whopping Medicaid cuts at the national level last week.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saluted Malone’s strategy, urging the party to refocus on winning critical local elections, “from school board to councils to state legislatures.”

Republicans, meanwhile, felt the sting.

“Damn,” posted Elon Musk, reacting to a screenshot of the election results.

But Malone had a quick reply.

“I’ll take this as a compliment, because Elon Musk knows I’m about to get to work for the everyday people of Pennsylvania, not him and his billionaire friends,” he wrote Wednesday morning.

The Trump administration has finally settled on one story: Someone else within the administration—and not national security adviser Mike Waltz—is to blame for the massive internal fuckup that resulted in Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, being added to a Signal group chat in which top defense officials were planning a strike on the Houthis in Yemen.

“So your staffer did not put his contact information.… How did it end up in your phone?” asked Fox’s Laura Ingraham, referring to Goldberg’s contact information and adviser Mike Waltz’s phone.

“Well that’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Waltz replied.

“But that’s a pretty big problem—”

“That’s why we’ve got the best technical minds, right?”

“That’s disturbing.”

“I mean, I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was … said one person and then a different phone number [came up],” Waltz replied.

“But you’ve never talked to him before, so how’s [Goldberg’s] number on your phone?” pressed Ingraham, asking the most obvious question in all this.

“Well if you have somebody else’s contact and then somehow it sucked it in,” Waltz said, seemingly trying to convince even himself.

“Oh, someone sent you that contact….. Was there someone else supposed to be on the chat that wasn’t on the chat?”

“So the person that I thought was on there was never on there.”

“Who was that?”

“Well, look, Laura, I take responsibility, I built the group.”

Trump echoed Waltz’s retelling of events, directly blaming a lower-level staffer.

“What it was, we believe, is somebody that was on the line, with permission—somebody that was with Mike Waltz, worked for Mike Waltz, at a lower level—had, I guess, Goldberg’s number, and called through the app. And somehow this guy ended up on the call,” the president said, who seemed to think this was some kind of conference call.

“It wasn’t classified as I understand it, there was no classified information, there was no problem. And the attack was a tremendous success. So I can only go by what I’ve been told, I wasn’t involved in it.”

The White House has claimed over and over that there were no war plans and nothing classified within the Signal chat. The screenshots that Goldberg first published—and the others he posted Tuesday after being called a liar by the administration—directly contradict that.

Republicans are struggling to defend the Signal group chat set up by Trump administration officials to discuss airstrikes against targets in Yemen. The chat, as the entire world now knows, mistakenly included the editor in chief of The Atlantic after a personal invite from Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz.

The chat may have violated the law and certainly went against Department of Defense regulations, including a warning one week ago about security vulnerabilities within the Signal app that were being targeted by Russian hacking groups. But that hasn’t stopped leading Republicans in Congress from trying to put a positive spin on the colossal mistake.

Senator Ted Cruz said that the substance of the group’s discussion should have Americans feeling “very encouraged.”

“What the entire text thread is about is President Trump directed his national security team to take out the terrorists and open up the shipping lanes. That’s terrific,” Cruz told journalists on Tuesday.

Senator Josh Hawley also tried to put a positive spin on the fiasco. “It’s the president’s advisers discussing among themselves options they might recommend to the president,” Hawley told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, “and nobody can deny the success of what the president is doing here.

“And this is what the leftist media is reduced to. They can’t argue with the policies, which the American people support. They can’t argue with this new demonstration of American strength that is keeping Americans safe at home and abroad, and so now we’re griping about who’s on a text message and who’s not. I mean, come on,” Hawley added.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson tried to push the same message.

“What you did see, though, I think, was top-level officials doing their job, doing it well and executing on a plan with precision,” Johnson said Monday night. “That mission was a success. No one was jeopardized because of it. We’re grateful for that.”

Representative Dan Crenshaw told Fox Business that “it’s a mistake and we gotta move on.”

“If Secretary Hegseth says there was no classified information, I’ll take him at his word,” Crenshaw said to Maria Bartiromo Tuesday morning.

None of these Republicans addressed the fact that government officials were having a serious national security discussion on a private messaging app that could easily be used to evade mandated record keeping. This could be one of many chat groups where government business is being discussed, but only happened to see the light of day due to a journalist being added by accident. Will anyone involved be held accountable?

Donald Trump still doesn’t seem to know what Signal is, more than 24 hours after his administration was revealed to have discussed sensitive war details about bombing another country on the private app.

“So are you saying you’re OK with the continued use of Signal by administration officials?” asked a reporter at a White House press conference Tuesday afternoon.

“No, that’s not what I said,” Trump said. “I said we’ll look into it, but everybody else seems to be using it. It seems to be the number one–used device or app, whatever you want to call it.”

The president then continued to argue that there may be future circumstances under which the administration may be “forced” to use Signal, even though it’s an unofficial channel for information that was easily infiltrated by a journalist who, in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s words, is “deceitful and highly discredited.”

“I don’t think it’s something we’re looking forward to use again, we may be forced to use it. We may be in a situation where you need speed as opposed to gross safety, and we may be forced to use it,” Trump added.

The president did not elaborate on what “gross safety” meant, but it’s unclear how his Cabinet’s reliance on Signal would be more efficient than the traditional and secure channels used by prior administrations.

Trump administration officials accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal chat regarding sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen earlier this month. Some of that information, shared by Hegseth in the chat, included a detailed operation plan, potential targets, weapons used, attack sequences, and timing of the airstrikes. The existence of the group chat was verified by a spokesperson for the National Security Council, Brian Hughes.

The monumental slipup was a horrific omen for U.S. national security, whose weakest link is apparently a crew of Cabinet members who can’t accomplish the basic due diligence of double-checking who they’re adding to a group chat hosted by a private company.

Trump officials repeatedly denied that they had disclosed confidential information in the immediate wake of the scandal. But National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe began to fold during a Senate hearing Tuesday, with Gabbard claiming that she could not answer questions about the chat because of its sensitive nature, while Ratcliffe conceded that the conversation should have been conducted through “classified channels.”