of people who apparently knew what the other people were doing and seemed to be coordinated. He says that the Durham report and other legal actions have essentially proven the main points that the lawsuit would try to establish, which is it was fake. We know who the people involved were, and we know pretty much that they communicated. But maybe that's the extra stuff they have to add to it to give some testimonies and stuff like that. So that is really interesting as a legal strategy, and I'm all in for that. We should absolutely know if our government was real or we were just run by a bunch of hoaxes and RICO and some deep state stuff. I don't know.

Well, in other news, Representative Thomas Massie, he's introducing a bill, the Dual Loyalty Disclosure Act. So if somebody is a candidate for federal office, they would have to disclose all the countries in which they are citizens. Now you're probably saying to yourself that seems unnecessary because everybody knows who's a dual citizen, right? I mean it would be easy to check, and if somebody had dual citizenship and they were in Congress, you'd know about it, right? Apparently there's no reporting requirement and there's no place you can look it up. So we could have thousands of people in Congress who are actually citizens of other countries at the same time they're citizens of the United States, and we wouldn't even know it.

Now I know what you're going to say: Israel, right? Say it. You know that's what you want to say. You want to say there are members of Congress who are secretly also dual citizens of Israel. Well, according to my limited research, there's no known case of that. So if you have different information than I do, let me know. But to the best of my very quick analysis, there's no example of that. There doesn't seem to be, as far as anybody knows, any member of Congress who's a dual citizen. Now that actually surprised me. I thought there'd be one or two. And I don't think there's anybody else who hasn't at this point renounced their dual citizenship. So there were a few that were not related to Israel where people were challenged. I think Ted Cruz was one. Ted Cruz had Canadian citizenship as well as American, and I believe he renounced the Canadian part as soon as it became an issue. And I think there were a few other candidates or a few other politicians who were in the same situation. They weren't really wed to the other country, so they just renounced it and fixed it. But I guess I approve of this. I don't think it'll make much difference in the real world, but it'd be good to know.

All right, let's talk about Signal gate. Believe it or not, I think I can add something to the story. It's a boring story, and that's the biggest part of the story, is that it's too boring for the public to get interested in. Imagine if you didn't follow the news like we do, like obsessively trying to figure stuff out all day long, and you heard about, oh, they used the Signal app. Like you wouldn't even know why is that bad or anything like that.

So here's something that CIA Director Ratcliffe said in a statement, and he was dumping on the reporter who wrote about it, Jeffrey Goldberg. He's the one who was added to the Signal group. We don't know exactly how he was added yet, but it wasn't by Ratcliffe. And anyway, so CIA Director Ratcliffe said yesterday, I spent four hours answering questions from senators as a result of that article, intimating that I transmitted classified information. Now I didn't know that. I didn't know that Goldberg suggested that maybe Ratcliffe had transmitted classified information, because we didn't see any example of that. So I didn't know that was being even suggested. And then Ratcliffe says those messages were revealed today. I did not transmit classified information. I guess we can now just look at the messages and see he's right. He said the reporter, Goldberg, who I don't know, intentionally intended to indicate that the reporter also indicated I released the name of an undercover CIA operative. In fact, I released the name of my own chief of staff, who is not operating undercover. And that was deliberately false and misleading.

Okay, that's pretty bad. That's pretty bad. Imagine being accused—you're the head of the CIA—imagine being accused of releasing the name of an undercover CIA agent and then finding out literally nothing like that happened. It was just made up, apparently.

But I want to redo this last sentence and see if this sounds familiar to you. So Ratcliffe's summary sentence was the mission was a remarkable success, because that's what did happen, not what could have happened, not what could have happened. Have you noticed the pattern? The pattern that Democrats have imaginary concerns. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit.

But I wrote a post on X that I thought captured some of the nuance that nobody had captured yet on this Signal thing. So starting with, if Hegseth—and I believe this is true—Secretary Hegseth, he has the power to declassify content. So all he has to do is say declassify this and it's declassified. So in my opinion, putting that content on Signal, which is what he did, is a de facto declassification. Now it's the same thing I said about Trump and Mar-a-Lago. If the person who's in charge of saying something is classified or not intentionally puts it in a place that they know is not classified, that's a de facto practical declassification. Now it should be with paperwork, but is that the problem? Are we mad at Hegseth because he didn't do paperwork? That wouldn't make anybody mad, would it? If he intended it to be in a non-classified setting, and obviously he knew this Signal was not their top secret setting, so he very consciously put it into a less than completely secure setting. I would call that a de facto declassification.

Now here's the thing that you'll see in the news over and over again, and I think I'm about the only person besides Greg Gutfeld who ever calls this out, which is I call it the half opinion. If the only thing you knew about the story is that somebody took some information that you think should be in the most maximized secret setting and they moved it to a less secret setting, how would you judge that? And there could be potential military implications to it. How would you judge that? Well, I'd say that's a mistake. That's a pretty big one, right? If all you're looking at is the cost of it, you know, what's the downside, what's the worst that could happen? I'd say that's terrible. But what are we leaving out? We're leaving out why he did it. Why did he put that information in that setting? Well, it's because he had a mission. He'd been asked to keep this very group of people informed right up to the last minute. I mean the timing of it was important, and it was very important to keep them informed in case somebody had a last-minute objection. Because remember, this was big stuff. He was ready to kill a whole bunch of people, which presumably is what happened when the strike happened. So before he decided to unleash death—death like people dying—he wanted to make sure that the people most involved got their final say. And I don't think that that was just checking a box. To me that seems important, that if you've been asked to keep this group informed, it's because this group might be the ones who say, you know what, hold on, hold on. I have such an objection, or I found something new, or maybe there's something we haven't considered. Maybe they would have delayed it, and that could have been really important, right?

So if you were to judge it as did he take something into a less secure platform? Yes. By itself that would look like a mistake. But if you judge it by what was he trying to accomplish, which was to make sure that the people most important to the decision were still okay with the decision before he killed people, before he killed people, that seems pretty legitimate to me.

Now let me tell you something about every big organization I've ever been involved with. If you followed all of the rules of any big organization, be it a corporation or anywhere else, you would immediately bring that corporation or organization to its knees. Because big organizations have enough rules that you wouldn't be able to get anything done. Let me give you an example. One of my first jobs out of college, I was a bank teller. And one day I cashed a bad check, and it's because I didn't check identification properly. Now the reason I didn't check is because the person who brought the people with the check in and stood right there at the window with them was a friend of mine. So the friend says, well, you know, I can vouch for these two. They're friends of mine. I thought, oh, that's safe enough. I mean this is my personal friend. Turns out they were criminals. So I mean I just got scammed. So I didn't get fired because it was sort of a first offense and it wasn't that much money. But I did get a talking to. I got a stern talking to. And the stern talking to was you don't get to decide which of the rules you follow and which ones you don't follow. You will follow all the rules. And I looked at my supervisor and I said, you got it. And within two hours the line for the tellers was out the door, and I was serving very few people because almost every encounter required me to call my supervisor over because that was the rule. If there was anything that was above my pay grade to approve, I couldn't do it. So I brought the entire bank to a standstill. I crashed the bank. It couldn't do anything for customers, and they were just lining out the door. And what was I doing? I was just following all the rules. I was doing it quickly. I wasn't dragging my feet. I was just following their own rules.

And one time I called my supervisor over, and there's some guy who works for Chevron, and he didn't have ID or he didn't have—I guess he didn't have an account at our branch or something. And she comes over and she takes one look at him. She goes, approved. I go, hold on, hold on. What did you do that I couldn't do? Like you just looked at him. You literally just looked at him. Why couldn't I do that? She goes, well, I noticed he was wearing this lapel pin that tells me that he's worked for Chevron for I don't know at least 10 years or something. And she goes, yeah, nobody would know to wear that little pin if they were a crook. And I thought, well, I'm pretty sure that's not in the rules, the lapel pin trick. So this is a pattern that you'll see everywhere.

Now do you think this is different in the military? Do you think the military could possibly function if everybody followed all the rules all the time? I doubt it. If it's like every other big organization, no. It's probably a whole bunch of people who are continuously looking for some way to get around the rules and regulations just to get something done. That's probably the most normal situation in the world.

So now you've got Pete Hegseth who's given this job. Your job is to keep this group of people informed right up to date, like not once a month but like right up to the operational point. How is he going to do that? You tell me the other way he was going to do it. There wasn't another way he was going to do it. There was no other mechanism. The government does not have a secure chat group. And if it did, it would require those same people—what, a dozen or 16 or whatever—to all be sitting in an office at the same time. Do you think that ever happens? No, it never happens. So he did not have any tool, any process, any way to do the thing that he had been tasked to do that was important enough that it could save the lives of those people who ended up being killed. It was life and death, and it was his job. It was life and death, and it was his job to keep them informed. There was no other way to do it.

So what did he do? I can't read his mind, but what it looks like is he said this is not ideal—just again, I'm just guessing—this is not ideal to put this on Signal. But it's only two hours between now and the time of the attack, and it's important that we've got everybody on board. I mean that's just critically important. So he took a little bit of a risk like everybody does in every big organization if they're trying to work within the rules, and he got a little bit of a benefit, which is he did what he was asked to do before he killed people, before he killed people. I mean I feel like we're forgetting—we've somehow forgotten the humanity of it. This was life and death, and you do want to make sure everybody's on the right page before the missiles fly. So telling them exactly when the thing was going to happen is very critical. Completely appropriate to do. Do you have a final objection? Very important, because if there's two hours, maybe you say no. If it were a day, maybe you'd say yes.

Now here's the question you're wondering: just what was the risk level of putting something on a Signal? Well, here's your rather real-world reveal. I don't believe the Houthis have a sophisticated hack operation, do you? Do you think the Houthis had penetrated the phones of the United States government? Do you think the Houthis had a back door to the Signal? I'm going to say no. But before you say it, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Scott, it doesn't have to be the Houthis. It could have been the Russians, and then they tipped them off. Could have been China, and then they tipped off the Houthis. Could have been Iran. Iran has sophisticated hackers. Could have been Iran, and then they—well, Iran is on their side, so they tip off the Houthis.

But let me give you a little real-world context. If any of those major powers had access to Signal and they had penetrated it so that they could listen to our government talking about everything, they would have risked losing that access by tipping off the Houthis. Because we probably would have noticed if the Houthis in two hours kind of quickly adjusted their defensive positions. Because we'd be watching them by then, right? We'd have the satellites on, we'd have the drones flying over. And if suddenly two hours before the attack everything changed and they started rapidly moving their assets, how long would it take us to figure out it was because of the Signal chat? About five minutes. And then we would have stopped using Signal, and then the C