TOM BASILE: The Questions We Should Be Asking About Signal

It’s become the text chain seen ’round the world. Democrats are calling for resignations and the media is in pile-on mode. But is the real story really what we’re being told it is and are we asking the right questions?

For good measure – and briefly – the press and Democrats have spent a decade driving the message that there is some kind of Trump-MAGA monolith, where the president only surrounds himself with people who reflexively agree with every one of his positions all the time, and staff who have little to no role in decision-making. 

What the Signal chat shows us is a healthy discussion about the merits, timing and consequences of the military action. The fact that there is some disagreement among them or between members of the team and the president, is a very good thing. Private disagreements and healthy discussions among senior leaders in any administration are necessary to provide the president with a full understanding of the issues and the options. 

The conversation was substantive and collegial. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was likely the classifying authority for the military information that was shared on the app so even if any of it was classified – which he denies – he would have the ability to share it at his discretion with appropriate personnel.

This was U.S. surgical leadership, leveraging our clear military advantage over European and Middle Eastern powers after years of our assets being used as paperweights by the Biden White House.

But the contents of the text chain is not the story here as much as the media and Democrats might want it to be. The bigger and more inconvenient questions that must be asked are about Signal itself. 

Signal was founded in part by a guy named Brian Acton, who worked at Yahoo in the 90s and then sold Whatsapp for billions of dollars to Facebook. He then purportedly helped found the Signal Technology Foundation as a non-profit during the Obama years. 

According to the IRS, in 2023 the Signal Technology Foundation took in more than $22 million from anonymous sources. The organization had been in the red as of 2018. Acton’s other non-profits, Acton Family Giving and Solidarity Giving help fund a range of radical left-wing causes including the ACLU Foundation, Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, FWD.us, anti-Second Amendment groups, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Lambda Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others.

The app purportedly gained popularity during the George Floyd riots of 2020 among activists and then dramatically increased its usage during the Biden presidency. 

It’s a free public app developed by a left-wing activist. And even now, Katherine Maher of NPR herself is chairwoman of the board for the Signal Technology Foundation.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe admitted congressional testimony that the app had already been uploaded on his computer when he took office. 

Why would a private application largely owned and operated by a non-profit organization connected to a prolific left-wing donor and chaired by an infamous left-wing media figure be on government computers at the highest level unless the organization and the government had previously established some kind of relationship?

Let’s be clear, in order for that app to be installed on the computers of senior administration officials who hold top security clearances, the government and intel community would have had to either plus-up its capabilities or understand exactly how the firewalls and algorithms worked to ensure its security. 

That lends credence to the idea that the federal government has long had a full understanding of Signal’s systems, including how to punch through them and therefore possibly monitor conversations as well. 

The fact that this is an outside organization linked to the left also means there is a possibility outside forces could be utilizing the platform to spy on users.  

The individuals on the text chain would have been given clearance to use the app for sensitive conversations by career government IT personnel or members of the intel community when they were briefed on operational security upon entering office. They would have been given enough information about the security of the app from the IT specialists to feel comfortable having such discussions utilizing the application. 

There is no way that all of those experienced, senior level individuals, to a person, participated in a chat that any of them understood to be of questionable security. 

They had to have been told by the intel community or by career government sources that its use was acceptable. 

So, is it a monitoring tool for the government or for the far left? 

How deep does the Signal-Federal-Intel community relationship go, if there is one?  

We know the Biden administration established a government censorship complex. We know that Obama, through Operation Choke Point, the CFPB and other efforts, attempted to monitor Americans activities in unprecedented ways.      

Is Signal use by the government a way to funnel taxpayer money to a non-profit that then doles it out to left-wing activists? 

Is there a contractual relationship of some kind with the government? Has there ever been one?

For now we are supposed to believe that either all these officials are shockingly incompetent (which is highly unlikely) or it’s some colossal coincidence that just as DOGE is exposing deep state relationships with the far left and corruption in the executive branch, a liberal publication like the Atlantic is put inadvertently on a text chain about a military operation.

For all the talk about what was said on the text chain and whether the information was appropriately shared, we really should be investigating why the app is being used by the government in the first place, and could it be a deep state tool.

We may never know all the answers here, but this so-called scandal may in fact run a lot deeper. There’s more smoke here than what’s rising from the rubble of those Houthi targets. The Trump administration needs to get to the bottom of it – and fast. There may be little about Signal that resembles security, transparency or free speech.

Tom Basile is the Host of ‘America Right Now’ on Newsmax, conservative columnist, speaker, author of Tough Sell: Fighting the Media War in Iraq and a former Bush Administration official. Follow him on X @Tom_Basile. Learn more at www.TomBasile.com

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.