Walter Kirn
speaker
1,232 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 24 Nov
Walter Kirn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.
Appearances
Absolutely. Thanks, Megan. Thank you, Megan.
Well, what I found curious is that if I were a somewhat hostile journalist and were added accidentally to a group chat that included the vice president, the secretary of defense, and a national security advisor, I would lay low for a while and not blow my cover. I would say, oh, wow, I just got an accidental pipeline into the very heart of the security state.
Maybe I'm not going to come out the first time I get a little bit of news. So it was interesting to me that Goldberg decided to sort of blow this once in a lifetime chance to surveil the inside of the White House. He could add a four-year scoop. Oh, exactly. I'd have been writing a book. I'm waiting for the World War III war plan, not the bombing of the Houthis, which isn't all that controversial.
No, that's a good point. As you say, I think it made Vance in particular look good. He can't be he can't be construed as a Trump toady after looking at this. You know, he had some principled differences with Donald Trump. He said this conflicts with our messaging about Ukraine, with our general anti-war stance. Also, as he as you mentioned, it seems to favor the European interests over our own.
If there were if we're going to play games with conspiracy theories and 40 chess, it's J.D. Vance, I think, who comes out looking best because it shows that he's both in the loop, independent, thoughtful and nobody's fool. At the same time, he plays with the team. All I know is that I'm Jeffrey Goldberg sitting there going, wow, I had I had a bug in the White House. Now I don't.
Well, they can subpoena him and get it anyway. So what's the problem here? Why does the Trump administration have to go first? This feels like a giant advertisement for Signal to me. We find out that the CIA uses it and trusts it. Well, at least they went to Signal.
Peter Stroke, the head of counterintelligence over at the FBI, was, you know, talking to his mistress about how he was going to disrupt the Trump administration on regular text messaging apps. At least they've scaled up a little here.
Except we three and we're pretty, pretty hip people who try to follow these things. And yet we have no idea. What's strange about it is I've never accidentally added anyone to a signal chat. That hasn't happened to me.
Well, I would have thought that anyone of the other 19 might have had veto power over this and noticed it. That's what's strange.
I have better tradecraft than Mike Waltz, I've learned from this story. Why should I here in Montana with my strange group of friends, which are similar to yours, I imagine, Megan, you know, from all over the place, take more care with who I allow to see the more sensitive parts of my communications? The truth is we actually don't know.
And the more I think about this and the more I look at it, that the Democrats were ready to pounce on it suggests, hmm, I don't know that there might be more to it than we are hearing.
One thing that's interesting is that this is an actual war plan that everyone agreed with, except maybe J.D. Vance. I mean, Jeffrey Goldberg, it's not like they put Alex Jones on the chat. Jeffrey Goldberg, I'm sure, agrees with. Yeah, and that would have been interesting. But bombing the Houthis is not something that I think Jeffrey Goldberg disagrees with.
I don't even think that the Senate committee disagrees with it. It's interesting that this is a policy that really there was unanimity on, except in the case of Vance. And when this first broke, it was an anti-Vance story. That was how it was being spun. You know, Vance and Trump are at odds that that didn't survive the first news cycle. But it was how they first headlined this thing.
That would be or or what does Israel want us to do? Can somebody call them up? Right. Right. We didn't see evidence of that. See, I think Trump's management style or Putin. Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Can somebody call Putin and find out whether he's behind this? One time I almost burnt down a gas station I worked in. It created smoke and a terrible smell. I cleaned it up as best I could.
The next day, the boss came in and instead of punishing me, he looked around, sniffed the air and said, I feel like something went on here. Carry on. It was the greatest act of discipline I've ever received. Because to withhold punishment sometimes is to show true dominance. And I think that's what Trump has done here.
The ability to give grace in this situation is also in its shadow form, the ability to get rid of you. And I think everybody is going to shape up from now on.
If the Democrats could design a security leak, it would be to Jeffrey Goldberg. Why are they acting like they're unhappy with this thing? Right, they're not.
Yeah, yeah. It's 100% because of their numbers.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Well, I'm an actual novelist, unlike Harwood, so I'll give my competing image of Tom Holman. He's like a bouncer in a very big nightclub and finds some guys who've been harassing women in the women's bathroom and kicks them out the back door. And when they want to come back in the front door... Doesn't allow it.
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