Scandals Take Time.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the investigation into Romulus killing Remus continues to the present.
A new fresh scandal breaks in Donald John Trump’s final presidential term, and in the comments you see something like, ‘I say! They never are held to account!’
I saw that today, in response to the story about the secretaries of the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of the Treasury, along with the Vice President, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Director of National Intelligence, using a private messaging app to discuss the preparations to attack the Houthis in Yemen (e.g., “Trump officials texted war plans to a group chat in a secure app that included a journalist”). I think this is a big story, given in shows such atrocious judgment by cabinet members, along with likely violations of law. So I calculated and added to my (inaptly-named) “fun facts” fortunes file the following: “There were 783 days between the Watergate burglary and President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation. (17 June 1972–9 August 1974.)”
I wanted to inform myself and remind myself just how long the top-tier benchmark scandal of modern American politics took to fully work its way through the bowels of the media–political system. Granted, that was a different time in America, not least in what technology was available and what the media is and was capable of. But even today it takes time, and patience, to learn what really happened, to see it processed and dealt with (or not).
Resignation.
The first scandal-driven resignation of the first term (see “Tom Price (American Politician)”) took place on 29 September 2017—252 days in. Given the caliber of the second cabinet, one suspects they’ll beat that benchmark. If you look at the first term of Donald John Trump, you’ll see there were plenty of resignations—some forced, others people bailing from a sinking ship, and others were fired for doing the right thing, the wrong thing, or for nothing.
If the president thinks something in his administration makes him look bad, and it’s not dear to him, he will see that those responsible are fired or quit—whether it’s his fault or not.
The present scandal is threefold. Including a journalist in secret discussions is obviously a grave mistake. The use of unvetted and unauthorized software to host those national-security-level discussions, involving several cabinet members, is an all-around failure of the highest sort. It will take time to find out if any of them raised any objection, if any of their staff showed even the slightest concern that the law should be followed.
But the third component is whether and why the Secretary of Defense decided to share any operational details with other officials. You can argue they had reason to know about the operation itself, in broad terms, but that’s a very different thing. There didn’t seem to be any need for them to know any specifics, and so they shouldn’t have been read-in on those specifics.
Basic facts, like whether and how the National Security Advisor added the journalist to the chat, need to be pinned down. He has claimed publicly that he did not have the journalist as a contact, so it’s an open question whether he did it, a staffer or someone who otherwise might have had access to his device, or whether it could have been a third-party via account credential compromise, or some other activity. Not investigating to get the details would be at least as stupid as the scandal itself.
There will be investigations to discover how widespread these sorts of practices are, in this administration and beyond. The executive branch and military spend a lot of money on security, and to throw it away for convenience or because these people haven’t been properly trained in security is wasteful. But investigations do take time, and they may be obstructed by the current administration. They will still happen.