It goes without saying that Defense leaders shouldn't be doing military planning on a commercial app. But the issue here isn't just OPSEC. Especially in security matters the govt often has to act with great security. And some of those secrets have to be kept for a long time. But they're the US ... 2/ government's secrets. What happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis? 9/11? Some of that stuff is still classified. But it's all their in the USG possession. It's own by the American people. It's very, very unlikely that this was a one off. We should assume that also sorts of critical ... 3/ decision making is being done in the same way, out of earshot of the American government. And by the American government we mean that thing that Trump at a personal level has never been able to accept - that the US government is the property of the American people and only temporarily run ... 4/ by specific individuals. And it's not just a matter of future novelties and help for future historians. The President and the Sec Def and all the rest are still subject to the law. That's true whatever phony decisions the current SCOTUS has come up with. Remember that in term one ... 5/ Trump wanted to be able to talk with Vladimir Putin without any other US officials listening in. After his notorious meeting with Putin in Helsinki he confiscated his translator's notes and ordered him not to discuss the details of the meeting with any other US govt officials. 6/ This bizarre Houthi story is just a window in to what is almost certainly pervasive. You'll notice there are no comments in the chat thread with one of them saying, "hey is this weird that we're talking on Signal? Is this allowed?" Of course not because they do it all the time. 7/ Who knows what these guys are doing. But we don't need to be down on Trump to posit he does bad stuff in conversations with other leaders. You don't confiscate translator notes unless you did something wrong. Trump got impeached for what he did in that call with Zelensky. 8/ I'm sure he won't have those kinds of communications on a US govt phone line again. That's where you'd do the bribes and plots against the US govt or just criminal activities you might ask other governments to do for you. 9/ Everybody's response to this seems off. Who cares about this one chat. There are hearings about this where they're going to get asked. The operative question is: what other communications are taking place over insecure but secret apps. Have Hegseth and Rubio and Waltz done this before? 10/ What about Gabbard and most of all what about Trump himself?