A Needless Trump White House Security Debacle

This time, astonishingly bad White House security didn’t cost any American lives, but next time the Pentagon may not stay so lucky

In the national security arena, communications security, what spooks call COMSEC for short, can be a matter of life and death. Bad COMSEC can kill. With alarming ease, it will compromise the nation’s secrets and security. Now we have a glaring example of appalling COMSEC by the Trump administration at the highest levels that reveals systemic problems requiring immediate repair before something terrible happens.

First, a caveat. I have no partisan agenda. This newsletter has strenuously criticized Team Trump in the past, and over the last four years Top Secret Umbra laid bare the sometimes-grave security weaknesses of Team Biden, to include penetration and manipulation by multiple Hostile Intelligence Services (HoIS). Now that Trump has returned to the White House, it’s MAGA’s turn to feel the counterintelligence heat. That’s what I do.

The source of this COMSEC failure will raise suspicions among Republicans. It comes from Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. A top member of the liberal media elite, Goldberg has never demurred from flaunting his dislike for Trump, while his publication has been a trenchant MAGA critic, fueled by the largesse of Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, and a major funder of Democrat and progressive causes. Goldberg is a particular bugbear for Trump since in 2020 he reported based on unnamed sources that the president had smeared U.S. military dead as “losers” and “suckers,” a claim that Trump has angrily denied on multiple occasions as “fake news” and “disgusting.”