The greatest threat to America’s security? Donald Trump’s inept inner circle

News broke on Tuesday that senior members of the Trump administration were using the encrypted messaging app Signal to plan major military strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. The vice president, secretary of defence, and the White House chief of staff were all involved in the chat, which came to light only because one of the group chat’s members accidentally added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg.

It’s no secret that people who work at the White House use Signal. When I worked there, we used it to co-ordinate team dinners or remind someone about a meeting. But we took seriously the laws that demanded that anything relating to our work be done on official devices and in ways that could eventually be publicly declassified and released, not deleted at the whim of a private app.

We all took seriously the idea that the public should be able to scrutinise what we were doing; that is the entire point of the Presidential Records Act.

The first issue with this week’s Signal story, and perhaps most egregious, is that these officials were risking the lives of American military and intelligence members by sharing information outside secure channels. Normally for a military strike like this, classified information is discussed in secure facilities where mobile phones aren’t allowed. That’s because it’s nearly impossible to fully secure any mobile, and it ensures people can’t just randomly get drawn into the conversation. Notes from these meetings are held securely, and the decisions made in these meetings are put into official memos that, unlike Signal chats (which auto-delete after a certain number of days), are permanent.

The second is constitutional – and nothing new. Since 2002, presidents have been rightly criticised for waging a war in Yemen. While a president can act in the case of an emergency, under US law, only Congress can declare a war. These texts themselves say that there was no such emergency.

The third issue is more dire. It appears that government officials were either using an encrypted app designed to protect the free speech of average citizens to hide their decisions from the public, or because they have little to no respect for the public’s right to know what leaders are doing in their nation’s name. But Americans have a right to know that the secretary of defence has a “loathing of European free-loading” and that the vice president “hate[s] bailing out Europe again”.

There is, of course, always a tension between security and liberty, but it seems these officials chose neither. They did not protect vital national security information, and they were attempting to avoid public scrutiny by acting outside the legal requirement to these decisions.