Rules for Thee, Not For Me
Unequal treatment for senior officials is the norm, like it or not.
NBC News (“A DHS staffer faces serious punishment for accidentally adding a reporter to a group email“):
A federal worker accidentally includes a journalist on a detailed message in advance of a government operation.
While that sounds like the case of The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief being added to a group Signal chat by Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed military attack plans in Yemen, it’s not.
It’s what happened to a longtime Department of Homeland Security employee who told colleagues she inadvertently sent unclassified details of an upcoming Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation to a journalist in late January, according to former ICE chief of staff Jason Houser, one former DHS official and one current DHS official. (The two officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they do not want to endanger their current or future career opportunities.)
But unlike Waltz and Hegseth, who both remain in their jobs, the career DHS employee was put on administrative leave and told late last week that the agency intends to revoke her security clearance, the officials said.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has largely rallied around Waltz and Hegseth, with Trump on Wednesday calling it “all a witch hunt.”
[…]
The DHS employee who was put on leave did not speak to NBC News. The officials who did speak didn’t want to identify her out of fear she would face retaliation from members of the public who are pro-immigration enforcement.
The DHS employee told colleagues she accidentally added a reporter from a conservative Washington-based print publication to an email that included information about upcoming ICE operations in the Denver area. The officials said the information was not classified but considered law enforcement sensitive because it included the time of day for the operation and possible home locations where targets could be identified.
Realizing her mistake immediately, the employee called the reporter who agreed not to disclose the information, the officials said.
The ICE operation took place without incident, the officials said.
But another person on the email group flagged the blunder to higher-ups at DHS at a time when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and border czar Tom Homan were blaming leaks to the media for lower-than-expected arrest numbers during ICE roundups, the officials said.
Days later, the employee was placed on leave pending an investigation, the officials said. She was asked to take a polygraph test and surrender her personal cellphone, which she declined. She was then notified that the agency intends to revoke her security clearance, the officials said, which could keep her from working in the homeland security space again.
The employee has 30 days to appeal the revocation, one official said.
The employee has served in various agencies across DHS since President George W. Bush’s administration, including during the entirety of Trump’s first term, the officials said.
So, certainly a major fuck-up. My strong instinct is that, if it’s a first offense, it’s not deserving of ending a long career and possibly a loss of retirement benefits. But that’s a decision that can more readily be made by the chain of command, with access to more context. And, certainly, there is all manner of due process for the officer to present her case.
Naturally, there’s an elephant in the room:
Experts say it raises questions about unequal punishment for inadvertent leakers in the Trump administration.
Mary McCord, a former top official in the Justice Department’s national security division, which investigates the mishandling or leaking of classified information, said the two cases should be treated the same way.
“Both of these are examples of carelessness in the handling of highly sensitive information, the disclosure of which could put U.S. government employees or military members in danger,” added McCord, who is now a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center. “We should expect the Signal chat breach to be taken at least as seriously” as the DHS employee’s breach.
But, of course, “taken at least as seriously” is not the same as “treated equally.” Like it or not, senior officials are treated differently than junior employees. While “different spanks for different ranks” reeks of hypocrisy and sparks resentment, it’s often justified.
It gets more complicated still with political appointees. Those on the Signal chat—the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the National Security Advisor—are either elected officials; presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed Constitutional officers; or direct presidential hires. Barring impeachment, they serve at the pleasure of the President.* So long as the President retains confidence in them, their jobs are safe.
Would I prefer that people in the positions of highest trust in our government act with at least as much discretion as we demand of a private first class? Of course. But, ironically, none of the people on that chat** are required to undergo any of the training, valuable or otherwise, that the rest of us are.
Regardless, the examples are legion of senior officials escaping punishment for things that would ruin the careers—or even lead to jail time—for those at the bottom of the pecking order are legion. A combination of political clout, the ability to hire the best legal representation, and genuine regard for a lifetime of service all play a part in that.
________________
*Vance is in a special category; theoretically, he’s elected in his own right POTUS can’t fire him.
**Presumably SECDEF Hegseth took the training in his capacity as an Army and National Guard officer, but that’s happenstance.
Christ.
Healthy societies practice precisely the inverse: the higher the rank, the more severe the consequences for breaking the rules.
Some people just seem to enjoy having lawless boots on their necks. “It’s OK! These boots belong to important people.”
This kind of obsequiousness is exactly how one gets a lawless presidency, a lawless supreme court, and unaccountable law enforcement.
I was thinking along these lines the other day and I was wondering what you and other people with military experience think. Also, delete if a problem.
It seems to me after Signalgate and the likelihood that at some point the administration is going to send out soldiers/sailors/airmen out on some crazy mission that goes Blackhawk down (or worse). At that point, I’m confident that the Administration won’t accept blame and that’s gonna fall on a whole bunch of, let’s just say Generals for ease. I’m sure some of that class of leadership are strivers, crooks, or weirdos and will be happy to drown anyone normal in leadership. I can’t imagine there’s a ton at that level but some get through.
If you’re a normal General and you care about the institution and the people under your command, that’s got to frighten you. Right? Those people have to know what’s coming. They’re not all Flynn/Hegseth wackos.
I’m wondering the same basic thing about the people at the LT/Sgt level as well. I’m sure a lot of them thought they were starting a career and now they have to be thinking they’ll be blamed and ruined for stuff outside their control. I know that’s kinda what happens in normal times too, but this is worse.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well. I’m working on a migraine and the Italian Job is yelling at me.
@drj:
“When you’re a star they let you do it!”
Leadership by example, so setting the tone.
ETA: We have heard “I take no responsibility” pretty often from our current big guy, not that his authoritarian followers seem to mind this at all.
I don’t entirely agree with the comparison with the DHS employee. Based on the reporting, she may not have notified her superiors that she had inadvertently leaked the sensitive info to a reporter. The leak could have had consequences beyond the agency, despite the reporter’s verbal promise not to disclose it. Notifying superiors of things you’ve done/said that could have consequences outside the organization is a common expectation.
But there are no excuses for Hegseth. He began the job with the California water release screw-up, continued with his speech debacle in Europe when he negotiated away Ukrainian land in advance, and has proven to be shallow and irrelevant at nearly every public comment opportunity. And now he was found, apparently as a matter of course, to have put highly sensitive defense security information onto a non-secure platform, and refuses to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with doing that.
Listen to the blue sweater vest guy.
My experience, having been both an officer and enlisted was that there was a lot more external enforcement of security for enlisted people. There were constant reminders and it was actually kind of difficult to break rules. Of course in my case that is the 70s I am talking about. When I was an officer it was a bit more lax. Andy might have a different view. In the case of flag officers I think so much has been invested in their careers that I suspect a lot of their indiscretions will be carefully overlooked, and to be honest aids are taking care of a lot of the details. You have to get caught doing something obviously egregious like Petraeus to get punished is my guess.
I think what some people are hoping for is leadership by example. It still happens but this admin did not choose people for competence, experience and leadership ability. They need to look good on TV and/or be completely loyal to Trump. That means preferentially choosing people with marginal abilities who clearly understand they owe their positions to Trump.
Steve
@steve: My experience in the Air Force (40 years as officer and contractor) was that security was a regular feature of our working lives. Now, granted, the kind of classified items I dealt was that of acquisition of systems and technology. We worked in secure facilities, had processes and, more important, habits of being careful of documents, careful of conversations, careful of our surroundings. What was classified was specifically called out in Program Security Plans. I really don’t have any memory of documents accidently being walked off or thrown in the trash. Occasionally, in meetings, a classified topic would come up. The conversation would stop. Those not authorized to be part of that conversation would be asked to leave and everybody behaved professionally. Really not a problem. It is a matter of training and adherence to process.
James, your tone here (to me, at least) takes blame away from the higher-ups, who have friends excusing them already.
Let’s give slack to those who deserve it, and no slack to those who don’t.
@drj: I link to an article Rob Bracknell and I wrote for Defense One some years back on the subject. Higher-ups are generally held to a much higher standard in some ways but to a much lower standard in others. We expect privates and junior employees to make certain kinds of mistakes that we don’t tolerate in more senior leaders. But we also crucify junior employees for things like being late to work, whereas more senior employees have much more flexibility. (Then again, they’re also expected to work in “off” hours in a way their subordinates aren’t. Hell, we hold junior high students to a higher standard than we do tenured college professors for meeting deadlines, complying with instructions, and the like.
@Beth: There’s certainly an amateur hour level to some of this. Still, in some ways, this is a lot less serious than the transgressions David Petraeus committed as the four-star CENTCOM boss.
@Barry: I’m not really commenting on the specifics of the Signal fiasco so much as how we treat senior officials who screw up. This is far from the biggest scandal in terms of opsec we’ve seen from cabinet level officers and they seldom get meaningfully punished.
@Scott: I think it was bit more lax as an officer, but there was still a lot of attention. It just didnt seem as overtly harsh as when I was enlisted and maybe just the more general deference given to officers. Could just be my memory and TBH I didnt have a lot to do with security stuff so maybe it was unique to where I was stationed.
Just read James comment which I think describes it well. As a junior enlisted it was like they expected you to f&ck up. As an officer they didnt expect it.
Steve
My view is that the higher someone is, the more trust is placed on them and the more responsibility they carry. They have more authority and are better compensated. Also their screwups tend to be more costly. Therefore they should be held to higher standards.
Of course, it’s not that simple (where have I heard this before?) More is invested in them (usually), they are harder to replace (again, usually), and replacing them often menas shaking things up a fair to a great deal.
So, yeah, they can be allowed some minor rule breaking. But holding a classified chat on an unsecure app is by itself a very major breach of the rules, not to mention common sense. it’s the kind of thing that gets excused because nothing bad happened. Many security and safety rules apply to very unlikely events. Sometimes they are broken or overlooked, and nothing bad happens. Given enough instances, however, something bad is guaranteed to happen eventually.
In this case something did. It was leaked, however inadvertently, to a journalist. And while he didn’t rush to publish it, how secure is his phone and the computer(s) where he copied the info to? Who else did he show it to? And eventually a great deal of it was published.
So, absolutely, someone should get fired for this
Not that I expect anything remotely like this to happen in the felon’s fascist oligarchy.
Instead, he’s been heaping praise on Hesghet, and smearing Goldberg and Signal. And saying he doesn’t even know hwta goes on under his watch.
BTW, there are Ides in every month. Next one is April 13th.
The appropriate punishment definitely seems to be culturally based. In the United States, you hear “mistakes were made.“ Note the passive voice. In contrast, in the United Kingdom, something like this happens, and quite often, the person who screwed up simply resigns. Resignation is truly taking responsibility, as opposed to simply admitting mistakes. And often, in the United States, you don’t even see people admitting mistakes.
@Beth:
They will likely find a black, brown, gay, or female officer they can blame everything on, even if they were not related in any way to whatever disaster the drunk at DOD cooks up, and blame their presence on Biden’s DEI rules.
@Kathy: Absolutely. The people in command should indeed bear the greatest responsibility otherwise there would be no consequences for improper behavior and thus encourage it. When in the summer of 2016 Comey gave that statement about Hillary’s emails, he should have been sacked. It is the DOJ not the FBI that decides when to go to court. The head of the FBI was improperly chastising a potential target on live TV- never seen anything quite like that. I never understood why Obama didn’t fire him. Well, we all know how that turn out with the Comey letter a few days before the election- another wrongful and illegal action- we have been paying the consequences ever since. Thanks Barrack.
@Scott:
I once asked in a meeting with our Navy shipyard customer about a discrepancy between two of their drawings. The conversation stopped. I was left to make assumptions about the reason.
@Kathy:
Probably the only honest thing Trump’s said this week.
Last night I watched a clip of Jon Stewart going through the “free speech” support among the administration and its backers. Spoiler: It isn’t free speech at all.
@James Joyner:
Give it time. We will see bigger.
It’s hardly surprising that the ones without influence suffer more than the ones with influence for similar or less serious issues.. after all, who suffered – as an example – for Abu Ghraib? Just the immediate squaddies involved. Such is the world. And I’m sure there’s plenty of examples from the other side of the aisle. What’s notable is the hypocrisy of the attacks on others who were in similarly elevated positions who made less egregious errors – if indeed Hillary’s server could count as an error.
First, Mary seems to be ignoring the big difference that Signal is not an approved technology due to data retention needs, and that all the fuckweasels were using it in a direct, intentional breach of security in order to circumvent document retention.
That seems like a pretty big difference, which takes something from human error to human error while deliberately criming.
Second — I’ve never worked anywhere where we cared about security to that level, but if I did, I would be expecting tools that make the accidental leaks harder.
Why was this DHS employee able to email a reporter without realizing it?
There are countless ways of addressing this, but let’s start with the reporter’s email not ending in dhs.gov — the domain is a pretty clear giveaway. Yes, she also has to email contractors, and she also has to email randos… but you can create a process that isn’t overly cumbersome, and build tools to automate that process.
Maybe Elon’s Broccoli-haired Big Balls can get on that, rather than fucking up social security.
This seems like a process error more than a person error (there is a person error, but people should be expected to have a certain error rate, and the processes should make that harder).
If this employee was actively circumventing an existing process, then either that process is too cumbersome or the person needs to be fired. The cabinet folks should be fired.
Well, if you want to be technical about it, sure, that’s probably a motivation.
ETA: “Big Balls” is the kid with the broccoli haircut? Thanks. I was wondering but have never cared enough to keep track.
Britain sometimes used to have a short way way with incompetence in senior officers.
See Admiral Byng.
It appears the main worry is not Signal per se, though if not validated by NSA back-doors are always a concern.
It’s the use of unsecured devices by dimwits who can’t be trusted to keep their devices “clean”.
@Assad K:
A brigadier was demoted to colonel over it. A female brigadier in a pretty obvious scapegoating.
@Gustopher:
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Seems like “Tiny Balls” has been a naughty boy.
Thing is, Mr Coristine is now trying to play in the senior leagues, where serious people play, and secrets can be hard to keep.
Oopsie.
@JohnSF:
Dammit, link failed re Mr Balls.
@Rob Robinson:
Yes, this is an observable cultural difference — Americans tend not to be “front and center” on personal responsibility. Which is strange given that it would seem that consequences for failure in our society are relatively low when compared to a more authoritarian environment.
Given the personality of Trump, we will see even less personal accountability from his administration. But this has been a trending characteristic of the Gingrich wave of Republican politics for quite awhile: never admit a mistake, go immediately on the attack. A great tactic for scorched earth politics, but a terrible interchange for an open, democratic society. It has eroded personal ethos society-wide.
We’ve had this disagreement before, and I continue to think you are way to lenient on VIP’s. In my view, the cases where special treatment is justified are very narrow. And if you’re going to make exceptions for VIP’s, then they need to be spelled out in advance, and not become ad and post hoc justifications. The reality is that VIPs pretend to be held to standards and then renege when they get caught. Then the excuses and justifications come. I’m fine with people in positions of power getting different privileges as long as those are related in some way to the job requirements and as long as they are disclosed in advance.
And for security, there is nothing that justifies what these senior officials did, and the idea that the biggest foreign intelligence targets in the United States ought to be able to enjoy less stringent security procedures and no repercussions for violating them is bonkers (to put it kindly). Tier 1 foreign intelligence services put a huge amount of resources into surveilling and collecting on senior government officials. The threat is massively larger than it is for some private or GS-9. This is exactly why Clinton conducting her business on private devices and private systems was and remains highly problematic, despite what the “but her emails” crowd claim. Senior cabinet officials are the highest priority foreign intelligence targets, and making it easy for them for dubious reasons like personal convenience or avoiding FOIA is entirely unjustified.
These officials are already getting massive positional benefits that the little people don’t have. They have secure communications with them at all times. Entire teams are devoted to providing completely secure communications from almost anywhere on the planet. They have essentially private aircraft and vehicles and deployable systems that can give them secure communications. That is a valid and necessary benefit for a VIP that regular joes like me never enjoyed, but that everyone can understand is justified. Doing that shit on unsecured personal devices is entirely unjustified.
I’m not going to take your stance and throw up my hands and just accept that they should or can’t ever be held accountable. The only one who has been somewhat held accountable was Sandy Berger, who literally destroyed records and intentionally stole classified information to hide it from a Congressional investigation, and all he got was a slap on the wrist. Is that really acceptable to you?
I’m sorry, but for me, there is zero excuse, especially when it comes to national security.
You also have to consider that leadership comes with responsibility—responsibility to subordinates to set a good example. This Singal security breach is about as far from accepting responsibility as one can imagine. The administration’s excuses and culty Trump sycophants’ excuses are laughable in the best case. All of my former colleagues I’ve spoken to, both pilots and intelligence personnel, are livid about this. Some, like you, are just resigned to the reality that they are expendable, while the VIPs are not. Great for morale!
This incontrovertibly damages the credibility of the national defense leadership. To say nothing of all the other effects.
Foreign intel agencies now know how to focus their efforts. Does anyone think these Trump admin turds aren’t going to continue using insecure personal devices? (And the problem here isn’t Signal, which can be an authorized app in certain situations, it’s using insecure personal devices and systems, which are vulnerable and exploitable.)
And an under-discussed aspect of this is how much this stupid fuck-up has further destroyed our credibility with our allies, both in terms of being able to keep information they may share with us secret (already a major problem thanks to decades of piss-poor security, but strongly reinforces by this), but also the discussion that the hatred for our European allies isn’t just a public messaging campaign designed to get NATO to get its defense house in order, but it’s a view that is honestly held in private and what these people really think.
Finally, the hypocrisy goes without saying. Had a Democrat done this, Republicans would be screaming bloody murder and demanding arrests.
There are some bigger issues here, which are worth mentioning. The DC elite VIP culture, long a problem before Trump, needs to be addressed. In the last decade we’ve had Presidents, VP’s, cabinet secretaries, and other senior officials completely fuck-up the most basic information security concepts with zero apparent interest in stopping that.
Secondly is the technological and management issue of living in a world where communication is so easy. How do you detect and enforce rules that are so easily circumvented with an app on a phone? The only reason we know about this at all is because Waltz is a stupid fucker for inviting the reporter to the group. Even if there was a will among the DC elite and WH to take security seriously, there are real challenges to enforcement.