An NC senator could have prevented the Signal scandal, and so much more

The scandal over U.S. war plans made over a commercial texting app will linger for a while. But WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his “On My Mind” commentary, looks back at a moment where one of our own in North Carolina could have changed the path.

Sometimes you encounter something so monumentally dumb and wrong, involving so many people, that it’s hard to figure out who to blame.

That is most definitely the case with the Signal Affair — I don’t know if we’re officially calling it that, I’m just figuring that’s the title some mystery writer will use at some point.

You have surely heard the story by now, but I’ll recap it briefly here because I can still barely believe it. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, was minding his own business the other day when he got a notification on his Signal app. Signal is an app where you can send and receive encrypted text messages. Lots of journalists use it.

This particular message, though, was extraordinary. Goldberg had somehow been added to a group chat of top government officials who were planning to bomb Yemen in order to kill members of the Houthi Islamist organization. He watched as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth texted out the exact plans for the attack: the times, the targets, the military planes and drones they’d use.

Just set aside for a second — and I can’t believe I’m going to use that phrase in this context — just set aside for a second that it’s very likely civilians were also killed in the attack.

Jeffrey Goldberg should have never seen those war plans being made, not only because somebody mashed the wrong button and added him to the chat, but because none of this should have ever happened on Signal in the first place. The government creates entire secure rooms for its top officials to discuss these sorts of things. It’s possibly illegal to have those kinds of conversations on a commercial app, and even if it’s legal, it’s impossibly reckless.

It reminded me of the book and movie “All the President’s Men,” about the Watergate break-in and the cover-up that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Deep Throat — Bob Woodward’s source deep inside the government — said something that has stuck with me ever since. Here’s the line, performed by the actor Hal Holbrook:

“The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”

There are many people at fault for fobbing these not very bright guys off on the American people, up to and including a majority of voters in the 2024 election.

But I keep thinking about one guy who I think is pretty bright: North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis.

If you go back just two months — which seems like 20 years at this point — it was looking like Tillis might cast the key vote to defeat Hegseth’s confirmation as secretary of defense. If you remember, Hegseth had enough red flags to cover a football field — allegations of excessive drinking, spousal abuse, and mismanagement of nonprofits he had run.

But President Trump made clear that if Tillis didn’t toe the line, he’d find somebody to run against him in the next Republican primary. And so in the end, Tillis voted for Hegseth, causing a 50-50 tie that Vice President JD Vance broke in Hegseth’s favor.

I will always believe that Tillis knew better, and that he chose to save his own political skin to the detriment of the country he has vowed to serve.