With Signalgate, the media can show what they learned from 2016

The biggest upside of hunkering down with the fat new bio of longtime SNL producer Lorne Michaels is that it’s veritable Novocaine — it numbs the pain of tracking Team MAGA’s daily idiocies.

Inevitably, some squalid acts by the moron squad are bound to break through, such as Trump’s national security guys using Signal, a hackable commercial messaging app, to discuss classified war plans…with a prominent journalist inadvertently in the loop.

If a Democratic White House ever did something so reckless and stupid — and potentially illegal — rest assured heads would be detonating throughout the wingnut infauxtainment complex.

National security attorney Bradley Moss nailed it perfectly: The commercial app, “is absolutely not authorized for any type of classified discussion…(The high-ranking MAGAts) demonstrated nothing less than complete disregard for the very nature of secure communications. These are officials who are trusted with some of the most sensitive secrets the U.S. government has, who serve in some of the most sensitive positions within the U.S. government with all kinds of authority and leverage and discretion, and they are acting like 14-year-old children on this chat, thumping their chest and sending emojis back and forth the way my teenage daughter does.”

It’s like what Casey Stengel said about his hapless New York Mets: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” But at least the Mets were lovable. How far we have fallen from the early 1940s, when the deadly threat of Nazism was countered by Frankin D. Roosevelt. Thanks, electorate!

The chat details are devastating. When did Pete Hegseth and his band of boyos start using Signal for classified discussions, which are supposed to take place on secure government text chains to ensure the info is protected and later archived under the Federal Records Act? What else have they said that could be hacked by hostile foreign actors? How are America’s allies (assuming we still have some) supposed to trust that their most sensitive shared intel will be safeguarded?

Will this flagrant national security breach (perhaps one of many, for all we know) get the kind of blanket coverage that Hillary Clinton’s comparatively innocuous email “scandal” received in 2016?

It’s time for mainstream media (or what’s left of it) to step up — as a matter of fairness and in recognition that the Signal app scandal deserves the kind of blanket coverage Hillary Clinton’s comparatively innocuous email “scandal” received in 2016.

I can state with certitude that one big reason why Trump wasn’t stomped at the starting gate nine years ago is because the media did his bidding by gnawing with impunity on Hillary’s nothingburger.

She was wrong to use a private server as secretary of state. But the FBI said there was nothing to prosecute, and a 2019 State Department report said there was “no persuasive evidence” of any criminality. That was Trump’s State Department, by the way.

It’s weird that Trump assails reporters as “enemies of the people,” because he owes his ascent to their obsession with Hillary’s emails. For most of 2015 and 2016, they covered the “story” relentlessly, despite the dearth of actual evidence she’d breached national security. The paltry meal was stuffed with fillers like “Questions are being raised.”

This was a typical New York Times paragraph in August 2015: “But the email account and its confusing reverberations have become a significant early chapter in the 2016 presidential race and a new stroke in the portrait of the Democrats’ leading candidate.”

When Hillary was exonerated in 2019 by the State Department report, The Times buried its piece on page 16 and said that State’s announcement “appears to bookend a controversy that dogged Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.” Um…she was “dogged” by the “controversy” precisely because the press went overboard on the dogging. Two careful researchers subsequently pointed out: “In just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”

One commentator, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, did cop to his complicity. On the air after State’s exoneration, he said: “This is also a story about the news media, about how much time we spent on (Hillary’s emails) and that’s something that I have felt a great deal of responsibility for, because I talked about the emails here at CNN. I wrote about it in The New Yorker, and I think I paid too much attention to them, and I regret that, and I hope a lesson is learned.”

Yeah, we’ll see about that. Compared to what we already know about the MAGA team’s national security breach, Hillary basically jay-walked in traffic. If the mainstream media fails to give dogged disproportionate weight to the current reverberating scandal, it will be committing a crime against truth.

Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com

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