Senior members of the US National Security Council, including the White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have been accused of using their personal Gmail accounts to exchange sensitive information.
A senior aide to Waltz used a Gmail account to consult with government officials and exchange details on “sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict,” the Washington Post claimed on Tuesday, citing several sources within Uncle Sam.
Senior government staff are expected to use secure communications networks and dedicated devices to protect America’s secrets and to comply with a legal requirement that government records must be preserved. The newspaper, owned by Amazon baron Jeff Bezos, alleges Waltz did not always do so, and it claims the adviser routinely copied his personal schedule from Gmail into Signal messages to share with others.
The report does not say if any of that info was classified, but from an operational security and government records preservation standpoint it’s less than ideal for details of senior officials’ appointments to be stored in commercial services.
Allegations of Waltz using Gmail come days after the Signalgate scandal in which he set up a Signal group chat for very senior White House staff to discuss military action – and then accidentally included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg as a member of the group.
Goldberg published a story about the material he read in the group that revealed posts mentioned details of the timing and weapons systems used in an airstrike on Houthi rebels in Yemen. Waltz apparently wrote that an alleged Houthi missile designer had been spotted entering his girlfriend’s apartment block, which was then leveled in the assault.
This is fine
“Waltz didn’t and wouldn’t send classified information on an open account,” his spokesman Brian Hughes told the Post in response to its report about use of Gmail, and added that senior security council staff were instructed to use “only secure platforms for classified information.” He added that Waltz always cc’ed official business to his government accounts to comply with record-keeping rules.
You’d have thought that Waltz, a former Green Beret, would be a little more savvy. Not least because after Hillary Clinton was found to be using a private email server, Waltz – previously a Republican member of the US House of Representatives for Florida – was one of those who criticized her for doing so. See below.
This latest mess could be bad news for Waltz’s career. President Trump expressed his support for his loyalist but reportedly came close to firing Waltz last week, not for sharing such sensitive data on an unsecured platform but for inadvertently leaking it to the press.
Whether Waltz survives this latest SNAFU remains to be seen, but it looks likely. The President has said that he doesn’t want to “fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts.”
The Register has asked the White House for comment, and we await a reply. We’re also keeping an eye on our Signal inboxes just in case. ®
