The Trump administration is still grappling with the fallout from Signalgate, the revelation that 18 of the president’s most senior Cabinet officials, along with Vice President JD Vance, were texting each other on an encrypted group chat about an upcoming strike in Yemen against the Houthi rebels.

We only know this, of course, because national security adviser Mike Waltz inadvertently included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, on the text chain. Had it been any number of other, less security conscious journalists added to the group instead of Goldberg, the strikes might have been revealed to the public prior to completion, thus severely compromising a U.S. military operation and endangering any number of intelligence operatives and military troops whose coordination was needed to carry out the strikes.

Since Goldberg’s article first appeared — and even after he released the full text chain for all to see — the administration has invested all its energy into denying and deflecting blame, and precisely none into addressing the massive risk to U.S. national security posed by its own practices.

Yet Defense officials at a somewhat lower echelon had become aware of threats to national security even before the Goldberg story broke.

On March 21, just three days before the Atlantic story ran, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Joe Kasper issued a

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