Trump May Have a ‘No Scalps’ Policy. But It Isn’t Consequence-Free.

month or so ago, I opened an edition of this newsletter by noting that the office of Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned defense secretary, had issued a memo announcing a crackdown on leaks, including by using polygraphs if necessary; the exact impetus for the memo wasn’t clear, but it followed on the heels of a New York Times story claiming that Elon Musk was set to receive a top-secret briefing about war plans with China. I led with the memo to highlight the stunning hypocrisy of what happened a few days later, when Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, revealed that Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, had accidentally added him to a group chat on Signal, a privately owned messaging app, in which Hegseth shared highly sensitive plans for an in-progress strike on Yemen.