Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who occasionally takes an interest in national defense, is up in arms over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, after a journalist leaked what was supposed to be an important private text conversation detailing possible military actions.
Murkowski stopped short of joining Democrat colleagues in calling for Hegseth and Waltz’ resignation, but she signaled to her followers on X that her woman’s instinct to vote against the confirmation of Hegseth due to character issues (drinking and womanizing) has been proven correct.
“I am appalled by the egregious security breach from top administration officials,” Murkowski scolded on X. “Their disregard for stringent safeguards and secure channels could have compromised a high-stakes operation and put our servicemembers at risk. I hope this serves as a wake-up call that operational security must be a top priority for everyone—especially our leaders.”
The chat text over the app known as Signal was a discussion about possible US air strikes against Houthi fighters in Yemen. The chat was unclassified but the problem is someone — a staff member, apparently — had accidentally added the editor of The Atlantic Monthly to the chat, and when he received the message, he blasted it to the world.
Murkowski did not hold that leftist editor accountable for leaking what were obviously national security conversations.
In the past, Alaska’s female senator never criticized former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for going under anesthesia in December of 2023 for surgical treatment of prostate cancer, after never having advised the president or anyone else in the cabinet that he would be incapacitated. Murkowski did not comment then, even though by then it was clear that the president himself was incapacitated by dementia, and the Defense Secretary was unconscious. Although Americans still don’t know how long he was unconscious, a minimally invasive prostatectomy, as described in Austin’s case, takes between two to four hours.
Murkowski also didn’t have anything to say about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who left Ambassador Christopher Stevens to die in Libya in 2012, after Clinton ignored requests for additional security at the Benghazi Embassy compound and failed to respond to the crisis, effectively abandoning Stevens. Murkowski said nothing about Hillary Clinton keeping a server in her bathroom, from which she conducted top secret business.
Murkowski didn’t harshly criticize President Joe Biden when he recklessly withdrew American forces from Kabul, Afghanistan on July 26, 2021, resulting in the deaths of 13 US service members after a suicide bomber slipped through security at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport.
“I have never supported an endless war in Afghanistan and have called for our troops to eventually return home, but this was not the responsible way to leave the country nor was it even the manner the President’s own advisors recommended,” she said, without holding Biden or his top commanders accountable for the 13 deaths.
Murkowski said nothing about the cocaine found in the West Wing of the Biden White House, or Biden’s inability to complete a sentence over the past few years. She said nothing about former Secretary Antony Blinken collecting 51 signatures of former intelligence officials to lie about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
But in 2025, Murkowski is not holding Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to account after he wrote the story with all the details of the Signal chat to which he had been inadvertently added.
In previous eras, patriots would be calling Goldberg’s action treasonous, as defined under U.S. law (18 U.S.C. § 2381), in the sense that he gave aid and comfort to the Houthis, who have, since November 2023, conducted over 170 attacks on US and commercial ships in the Red Sea.
Even the magazine inadvertently characterized its own actions as dangrous, writing in its newsletter on Wednesday:
“The defense of the United States is a serious business. Breaches of national security are especially dangerous. So perhaps I should not have laughed at the reactions of Donald Trump and his staff and Cabinet members to the revelations by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and staff writer Shane Harris about a group chat on Signal (one that accidentally included Jeff) dedicated to planning strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.”
