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Because I don't know whether either of those are appropriate. There aren't many comparable breaches to this one. The closest in modern times may be Hillary Cli

Because I don't know whether either of those are appropriate. There aren't many comparable breaches to this one. The closest in modern times may be Hillary Clinton's email server being used for government business. In that case, the FBI investigated and declined to bring charges, under the expectation that a jury would be unlikely to render a guilty verdict. Okay, fine. But the FBI investigated and laid out the facts. My fear is that the current administration sees this as a PR problem. No, this was an operational failure. We should feel lucky that merely an American journalist was added by mistake. We should expect the FBI to investigate this, too. But I worry the facts are too inconvenient for even that level of accountability.

bb88 2y ago
Why would we expect Patel and Bongino to investigate anything here? They were put there to investigate anyone else other than the current administration. Why would any FBI agent take a risk on investigating anyone potentially in current or future administrations? They'll get fired later when the political winds change.
- tromp 2y ago
  With the current administration I expect that fierce loyalty trumps both competence and accountability. Sadly, I expect to see many more such examples of amateur hour.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
KerrAvon 2y ago
[flagged]
- joshuamerrill 2y ago
  The fact that nobody on the thread spoke up and said "we shouldn't be talking about this on Signal" worries me greatly. One possible explanation is that it happens all the time.
  - bb88 2y ago
    I think that's the point. Signal prevents what should be official government communications from being recorded. If it's recorded it can be investigated.
  - laidoffamazon 2y ago
    It likely does, this is one avenue they can converse without Elon or Trump interjecting
- trhway 2y ago
  It is significantly more severe than the diplomatic cables and the other leaks that Assange and Manning each did a decade for.
- donnachangstein 2y ago
  > There was no classified information on Clinton's server. This is absolutely false, or as the kids call it, "misinformation". A 3 second Google search confirms: 100 emails contained information that should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret". An additional 2,093 emails were retroactively designated confidential by the State Department. The whole issue with her emails is she purposely never labeled anything so as to have plausible deniability.
  - watwut 2y ago
    Nah, the whole outrage with her emails was performative outrage and hypocrisy. And no, they were not nearly comparable to what happened here nor to what DOGE does. Nor to what Trump did in the past. "But here emails" was just republicans doing what they always do and pretending to be angry over mild stuff while giving own people pass over big stuff.
    - drdeca 2y ago
      Not claiming that it is comparable, nor am I upset by it, but, one oughtn’t claim that there was nothing confidential there if there was, in fact, confidential stuff in there. I don’t care if this makes it easier for other people to make a narrative. If someone makes a false claim in these kinds of discussions, the false claim should be corrected.
      - jarpadat 2y ago
        I suppose a different claim strikes me as false. "should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent" is one thing, "there was, in fact, confidential stuff in there" is a different thing. I think a decent case can be made that one rounds up to the other, but I guess that case seems more like an argument to be made than a fact to be corrected.
        bb88 2y ago
        Just because something isn't labeled classified doesn't make it not classified. If you work anywhere with classified information, you are expected to know certain information is classified, or may become classified later. You may not always know the latter, but you should know the former. I'm not going to defend classifying embarrassing information because it's well -- embarrassing. But the established trend is to classify information "just to be safe" and let someone else make the declassifying decisions, particularly someone that's not you. There was a weird issue with Wikileaks in that publicly released information was still considered classified, and any documents must be still treated as such. Was that silly, yes. This led to a weird issue where journalists and members of the public had more access to certain classified documents than people holding clearances.
codewench 2y ago
18 USC 793(f) seems to apply here: "Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing ... through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust ... and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both." We can only guess about the "prompt reporting of the issue", but from what I've seen and heard I'm willing to put money on the fact that, no, this was not reported.
- bb88 2y ago
  Why would the FBI investigate anyone who would be pardoned by the president anyway?
  - belter 2y ago
    Don't worry, Courts are going away also... "Speaker Mike Johnson floats eliminating federal courts as GOP ramps up attacks on judges" - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johnson-floats-eliminating-federal-courts-rcna197986 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johns...
    - imglorp 2y ago
      Yes and the legislature after that. These are all smart people, so it boggles the mind to wonder how they can install a totalitarian regime without knowing the next two steps in the playbook.
      - chasil 2y ago
        Jefferson might have been called a totalitarian had the word existed when he signed the judiciary act of 1802, which removed judges added by federalists. I have learned about it this week. https://gingrich360.com/2025/03/18/an-intolerable-judicial-dictatorship/ https://gingrich360.com/2025/03/18/an-intolerable-judicial-d...
chasil 2y ago
Assuming this to be true, this conversation is over. "The Biden administration installed the Signal messaging app on CIA computers and approved it for official government use." https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/03/25/has-the-staffer-who-put-jeffrey-goldberg-on-the-signal-chat-been-exposed-n4938269 https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/03/25/has-the-staffer...
- bb88 2y ago
  It looks like it was approved only for CIA use with permissible use. Even though it was installed, did not mean it was suitable for all communications. Here's the important relevant quote: "It is permissible to use to communicate and coordinate for work purposes. Provided that any decisions that are made are also recorded through formal channels. So those were procedures that were implemented. My staff implemented those processes," Ratcliffe said. "My communications, to be clear, in a Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information," he added. https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-director-john-ratcliffe-defends-180306328.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-director-john-ratcliffe-defen...
  - sorcerer-mar 2y ago
    It's reasonable /u/chasil doesn't know this, but obviously there's no chance that Ratcliffe doesn't know this. Really makes one think! "My communications weren't classified" — my is doing some work there.
    - bb88 2y ago
      The classified community is one built on trust -- fundamentally that you won't leak information to others, perceived enemies or otherwise. This extends to elected or appointed officials and federal judges ruling on classified matters. But honestly most of the people in the group will be loyal to the US regardless of leader's political affiliation. But what they do ask is that classified information remain secret -- particularly if you're in harms way.
    - 2y ago
mulmen 2y ago
> FBI investigated and declined to bring charges Does the FBI make this determination? Wouldn’t that be the Attorney General’s call?
- bb88 2y ago
  Yeah, they do. The US Attorneys and the Attorney General are allowed to give input typically into whether any investigation is prosecutable. Now did they investigate it? Probably not. What's interesting to me is that personal phones were not seized for forensic examination though. Were the phones hacked by foreign agents? What other uses was signal used for?
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    That's backwards. Prosecutors don't give input, they decide whether to charge. The FBI investigates, but they aren’t the ones who are responsible for taking cases to court.
    - bb88 2y ago
      The FBI makes charging decisions all the time. The FBI has to be the one to investigate charges. Now whether or not said charges are prosecutable is the job of the DoJ. The demarcation line between the two is when the charges are filed in federal court. Hillary Clinton was famously not charged by the FBI director Comey back in 2016. Not because she committed any crime, but because they wouldn't likely get a conviction at trial.
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        > The FBI makes charging decisions all the time. No, they don't. > The FBI has to be the one to investigate charges. They investigate before there are charges. > Now whether or not said charges are prosecutable is the job of the DoJ. The FBI is part of the DoJ, but there aren't charges until a prosecutor—not an FBI agent—either gets a grand jury to return an indictment or files a criminal information (the latrer only an option for minor offenses or if the defendant waives indictment, usually as part of a plea bargain.) Prosecution isn't a separate thing from charges, it is what charges are. > Hillary Clinton was famously not charged by the FBI director Comey back in 2016. No, famously Comey announced that the FBI recommended that no charges be filed. Like I said, you have it backwards: FBI makes recommendations, federal prosecutors decide to charge, or not. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/fbi-recommends-no-charges-following-clinton-e-mail-investigation https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/fbi-recommends-no-charges-f... “FBI Director James B. Comey said today that the Bureau has recommended to the Department of Justice that no charges are appropriate following an extensive investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail system during her time as Secretary of State.”
mandeepj 2y ago
> The closest in modern times may be Hillary Clinton's email server being used for government business. Wait, there's more!! https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cummings-jared-kushner-and-ivanka-trumps-private-emails-texts-raise-security-concerns https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cummings-jared-kushner...
- rcpt 2y ago
  T took a top secret binder about Russian election interference to his beach house and we never got it back. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-rus...
georgemcbay 2y ago
> We should feel lucky that merely an American journalist was added by mistake. This time. We also have no idea how many times this has happened without the unique circumstances where the person incorrectly included would draw attention to the leak as part of their job as a journalist. Generally speaking, if something like this can happen once, it has probably happened more than once. We probably are very lucky that the time it very publicly happened was fairly early on in the tenure of this dumpster fire of a Presidential cabinet. Of course instead of them seeing it this way they are certain to keep going after the journalist in an attempt to make him the bad guy of the story to project blame away, because that is what incompetent people do.
- jameshart 2y ago
  Right, among the reasons not to use Signal for this sort of thing is that it is explicitly difficult to verify within Signal that a contact is who you think it is. It can be a secure channel if used correctly. This shows these people are not using it correctly.
sarcasmatwork 2y ago
Incorrect. "Clinton has said that she never used her personal email to send information that was marked classified at the time, although some of her emails had been retroactively classified. Comey says that's not true. Of 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department in 2014, FBI investigators found 110 emails containing information that was classified at the time the email was sent. Eight of those were top secret, the highest level of classification." "Another 2,000 emails have been retroactively classified since they were sent, Comey said." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/05/484785586/fbi-recommends-no-charges-for-hillary-clinton-in-email-server-case https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/05/484785586...
- dudinax 2y ago
  In reading deeper, many or most of these "classified" emails are comments on news stories that revealed information that another department would rather keep secret, such as news articles about CIA drone strikes, while the CIA at the time wouldn't acknowledge they had a a drone program. Clinton argued at the time that such emails aren't and shouldn't be classified, since she didn't discuss any information sourced from the CIA, but only the publicly available news article. That seems to me to be at least a reasonable stance.
  - vdqtp3 2y ago
    > Clinton argued at the time that such emails aren't and shouldn't be classified, since she didn't discuss any information sourced from the CIA, but only the publicly available news article. That seems to me to be at least a reasonable stance. It's absolutely a reasonable stance. However, the rules aren't reasonable. For instance, as someone who held a clearance at the time, discussing/disseminating the Snowden leaks that were published in national news was considered a violation.
- jimt1234 2y ago
  And Hillary sat in front of Congress for 11 hours.
tayo42 2y ago
> We should feel lucky that merely an American journalist was added by mistake. Might not even be the first time already, just the first time they messed up and we found out...
lmeyerov 2y ago
There is no reason to believe we are lucky. Instead, this is more of a canary in the coal mine that the DOD OIG and Congress are less able to excuse for a long-running hazard. How much of the administration, for how long, and for what, is using hackable systems and without mandated audit trails for protected communications? Whether external hackers are already successfully snooping, or internal cover-ups are happening of ongoing corruption, both are deeply problematic, and can be happening in parallel to stupid leaks like this. Likewise, we can't even investigate and cleanup properly because these people are illegally deleting the forensic data for their illegal and insecure actions. It's not even a surprise. Ex: It's already pretty well documented to embarrassing extents like the president flushing official documents down toilets and clogging them. Ex: The admins use of signal was a thing in the first term as well. The only new thing afaict is the public and checks-and-balances people have the evidence in front of them of illegal use when accepting the lies and criminality.
nla 2y ago
Hunter Biden: Hold my beer.

bb88 2y ago

Why would we expect Patel and Bongino to investigate anything here? They were put there to investigate anyone else other than the current administration. Why would any FBI agent take a risk on investigating anyone potentially in current or future administrations? They'll get fired later when the political winds change.

tromp 2y ago
With the current administration I expect that fierce loyalty trumps both competence and accountability. Sadly, I expect to see many more such examples of amateur hour.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

KerrAvon 2y ago

[flagged]

joshuamerrill 2y ago
The fact that nobody on the thread spoke up and said "we shouldn't be talking about this on Signal" worries me greatly. One possible explanation is that it happens all the time.
- bb88 2y ago
  I think that's the point. Signal prevents what should be official government communications from being recorded. If it's recorded it can be investigated.
- laidoffamazon 2y ago
  It likely does, this is one avenue they can converse without Elon or Trump interjecting
trhway 2y ago
It is significantly more severe than the diplomatic cables and the other leaks that Assange and Manning each did a decade for.
donnachangstein 2y ago
> There was no classified information on Clinton's server. This is absolutely false, or as the kids call it, "misinformation". A 3 second Google search confirms: 100 emails contained information that should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret". An additional 2,093 emails were retroactively designated confidential by the State Department. The whole issue with her emails is she purposely never labeled anything so as to have plausible deniability.
- watwut 2y ago
  Nah, the whole outrage with her emails was performative outrage and hypocrisy. And no, they were not nearly comparable to what happened here nor to what DOGE does. Nor to what Trump did in the past. "But here emails" was just republicans doing what they always do and pretending to be angry over mild stuff while giving own people pass over big stuff.
  - drdeca 2y ago
    Not claiming that it is comparable, nor am I upset by it, but, one oughtn’t claim that there was nothing confidential there if there was, in fact, confidential stuff in there. I don’t care if this makes it easier for other people to make a narrative. If someone makes a false claim in these kinds of discussions, the false claim should be corrected.
    - jarpadat 2y ago
      I suppose a different claim strikes me as false. "should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent" is one thing, "there was, in fact, confidential stuff in there" is a different thing. I think a decent case can be made that one rounds up to the other, but I guess that case seems more like an argument to be made than a fact to be corrected.
      - bb88 2y ago
        Just because something isn't labeled classified doesn't make it not classified. If you work anywhere with classified information, you are expected to know certain information is classified, or may become classified later. You may not always know the latter, but you should know the former. I'm not going to defend classifying embarrassing information because it's well -- embarrassing. But the established trend is to classify information "just to be safe" and let someone else make the declassifying decisions, particularly someone that's not you. There was a weird issue with Wikileaks in that publicly released information was still considered classified, and any documents must be still treated as such. Was that silly, yes. This led to a weird issue where journalists and members of the public had more access to certain classified documents than people holding clearances.

codewench 2y ago

18 USC 793(f) seems to apply here: "Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing ... through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust ... and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both." We can only guess about the "prompt reporting of the issue", but from what I've seen and heard I'm willing to put money on the fact that, no, this was not reported.

bb88 2y ago
Why would the FBI investigate anyone who would be pardoned by the president anyway?
- belter 2y ago
  Don't worry, Courts are going away also... "Speaker Mike Johnson floats eliminating federal courts as GOP ramps up attacks on judges" - https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johnson-floats-eliminating-federal-courts-rcna197986 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johns...
  - imglorp 2y ago
    Yes and the legislature after that. These are all smart people, so it boggles the mind to wonder how they can install a totalitarian regime without knowing the next two steps in the playbook.
    - chasil 2y ago
      Jefferson might have been called a totalitarian had the word existed when he signed the judiciary act of 1802, which removed judges added by federalists. I have learned about it this week. https://gingrich360.com/2025/03/18/an-intolerable-judicial-dictatorship/ https://gingrich360.com/2025/03/18/an-intolerable-judicial-d...

chasil 2y ago

Assuming this to be true, this conversation is over. "The Biden administration installed the Signal messaging app on CIA computers and approved it for official government use." https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/03/25/has-the-staffer-who-put-jeffrey-goldberg-on-the-signal-chat-been-exposed-n4938269 https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/03/25/has-the-staffer...

bb88 2y ago
It looks like it was approved only for CIA use with permissible use. Even though it was installed, did not mean it was suitable for all communications. Here's the important relevant quote: "It is permissible to use to communicate and coordinate for work purposes. Provided that any decisions that are made are also recorded through formal channels. So those were procedures that were implemented. My staff implemented those processes," Ratcliffe said. "My communications, to be clear, in a Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information," he added. https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-director-john-ratcliffe-defends-180306328.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-director-john-ratcliffe-defen...
- sorcerer-mar 2y ago
  It's reasonable /u/chasil doesn't know this, but obviously there's no chance that Ratcliffe doesn't know this. Really makes one think! "My communications weren't classified" — my is doing some work there.
  - bb88 2y ago
    The classified community is one built on trust -- fundamentally that you won't leak information to others, perceived enemies or otherwise. This extends to elected or appointed officials and federal judges ruling on classified matters. But honestly most of the people in the group will be loyal to the US regardless of leader's political affiliation. But what they do ask is that classified information remain secret -- particularly if you're in harms way.
  - 2y ago

mulmen 2y ago

> FBI investigated and declined to bring charges Does the FBI make this determination? Wouldn’t that be the Attorney General’s call?

bb88 2y ago
Yeah, they do. The US Attorneys and the Attorney General are allowed to give input typically into whether any investigation is prosecutable. Now did they investigate it? Probably not. What's interesting to me is that personal phones were not seized for forensic examination though. Were the phones hacked by foreign agents? What other uses was signal used for?
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  That's backwards. Prosecutors don't give input, they decide whether to charge. The FBI investigates, but they aren’t the ones who are responsible for taking cases to court.
  - bb88 2y ago
    The FBI makes charging decisions all the time. The FBI has to be the one to investigate charges. Now whether or not said charges are prosecutable is the job of the DoJ. The demarcation line between the two is when the charges are filed in federal court. Hillary Clinton was famously not charged by the FBI director Comey back in 2016. Not because she committed any crime, but because they wouldn't likely get a conviction at trial.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > The FBI makes charging decisions all the time. No, they don't. > The FBI has to be the one to investigate charges. They investigate before there are charges. > Now whether or not said charges are prosecutable is the job of the DoJ. The FBI is part of the DoJ, but there aren't charges until a prosecutor—not an FBI agent—either gets a grand jury to return an indictment or files a criminal information (the latrer only an option for minor offenses or if the defendant waives indictment, usually as part of a plea bargain.) Prosecution isn't a separate thing from charges, it is what charges are. > Hillary Clinton was famously not charged by the FBI director Comey back in 2016. No, famously Comey announced that the FBI recommended that no charges be filed. Like I said, you have it backwards: FBI makes recommendations, federal prosecutors decide to charge, or not. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/fbi-recommends-no-charges-following-clinton-e-mail-investigation https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/fbi-recommends-no-charges-f... “FBI Director James B. Comey said today that the Bureau has recommended to the Department of Justice that no charges are appropriate following an extensive investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail system during her time as Secretary of State.”

mandeepj 2y ago

> The closest in modern times may be Hillary Clinton's email server being used for government business. Wait, there's more!! https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cummings-jared-kushner-and-ivanka-trumps-private-emails-texts-raise-security-concerns https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cummings-jared-kushner...

rcpt 2y ago
T took a top secret binder about Russian election interference to his beach house and we never got it back. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-russia-intelligence-trump-dg/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/politics/missing-rus...

georgemcbay 2y ago

> We should feel lucky that merely an American journalist was added by mistake. This time. We also have no idea how many times this has happened without the unique circumstances where the person incorrectly included would draw attention to the leak as part of their job as a journalist. Generally speaking, if something like this can happen once, it has probably happened more than once. We probably are very lucky that the time it very publicly happened was fairly early on in the tenure of this dumpster fire of a Presidential cabinet. Of course instead of them seeing it this way they are certain to keep going after the journalist in an attempt to make him the bad guy of the story to project blame away, because that is what incompetent people do.

jameshart 2y ago
Right, among the reasons not to use Signal for this sort of thing is that it is explicitly difficult to verify within Signal that a contact is who you think it is. It can be a secure channel if used correctly. This shows these people are not using it correctly.

sarcasmatwork 2y ago

Incorrect. "Clinton has said that she never used her personal email to send information that was marked classified at the time, although some of her emails had been retroactively classified. Comey says that's not true. Of 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department in 2014, FBI investigators found 110 emails containing information that was classified at the time the email was sent. Eight of those were top secret, the highest level of classification." "Another 2,000 emails have been retroactively classified since they were sent, Comey said." https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/05/484785586/fbi-recommends-no-charges-for-hillary-clinton-in-email-server-case https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/05/484785586...

dudinax 2y ago
In reading deeper, many or most of these "classified" emails are comments on news stories that revealed information that another department would rather keep secret, such as news articles about CIA drone strikes, while the CIA at the time wouldn't acknowledge they had a a drone program. Clinton argued at the time that such emails aren't and shouldn't be classified, since she didn't discuss any information sourced from the CIA, but only the publicly available news article. That seems to me to be at least a reasonable stance.
- vdqtp3 2y ago
  > Clinton argued at the time that such emails aren't and shouldn't be classified, since she didn't discuss any information sourced from the CIA, but only the publicly available news article. That seems to me to be at least a reasonable stance. It's absolutely a reasonable stance. However, the rules aren't reasonable. For instance, as someone who held a clearance at the time, discussing/disseminating the Snowden leaks that were published in national news was considered a violation.
jimt1234 2y ago
And Hillary sat in front of Congress for 11 hours.

tayo42 2y ago

> We should feel lucky that merely an American journalist was added by mistake. Might not even be the first time already, just the first time they messed up and we found out...

lmeyerov 2y ago

There is no reason to believe we are lucky. Instead, this is more of a canary in the coal mine that the DOD OIG and Congress are less able to excuse for a long-running hazard. How much of the administration, for how long, and for what, is using hackable systems and without mandated audit trails for protected communications? Whether external hackers are already successfully snooping, or internal cover-ups are happening of ongoing corruption, both are deeply problematic, and can be happening in parallel to stupid leaks like this. Likewise, we can't even investigate and cleanup properly because these people are illegally deleting the forensic data for their illegal and insecure actions. It's not even a surprise. Ex: It's already pretty well documented to embarrassing extents like the president flushing official documents down toilets and clogging them. Ex: The admins use of signal was a thing in the first term as well. The only new thing afaict is the public and checks-and-balances people have the evidence in front of them of illegal use when accepting the lies and criminality.

nla 2y ago

Hunter Biden: Hold my beer.