Did the Trump White House cross legal lines in the ‘Signalgate' debacle?

Yahoo

25-03-2025

Sen. Chris Coons is not known for being a hyperbolic partisan, which made the Delaware Democrat's reaction to the White House's national security scandal that much more notable. 'Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime — even if accidentally — that would normally involve a jail sentence,' said Coons, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He was hardly the only one who made comments like these. Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California told MSNBC, 'There certainly could be a criminal offense here.' Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts added that members of Donald Trump's team engaged in 'blatantly illegal' misconduct.
The obvious next question, of course, is which laws did White House officials allegedly break. As journalist Garrett Graff explained:
18 U.S.C. § 793(f) makes it a federal crime for people entrusted with information related to the national defense to, 'through gross negligence permit [classified intelligence] to be ... delivered to anyone in violation of [that] trust.' ... Did anyone realize that [Jonah Goldberg, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief] was in the chat? If so, that's a separate violation of 18 U.S.C. § 793(f), which requires anyone 'having knowledge that [classified intelligence] has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust … fails to make prompt report of such loss.' If no one is monitoring who is leaving these group chats nor paying attention to who is added and who is in one conversation vs. another, that's a recipe for even more counterintelligence failures going forward.
Graff added, in reference to the group chat, 'This is clearly not a Signal thread that anyone had any intention of preserving — as they are legally required to do! — under federal records law.'
Oddly enough, at least one member of the White House's team seemed vaguely aware of all of this. According to The Atlantic's reporting, the Signal group chat started on March 13. One day later, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — one of the officials included in the group — published a tweet that read, 'Any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.'
Eleven days later, the next question is whether such alleged violations really will be 'treated as such.' In theory, an independent Justice Department could open an inquiry into whether senior administration officials crossed any legal lines.
In practice, it seems difficult to imagine anyone currently working in federal law enforcement would even consider the possibility of scrutinizing the scandal.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com