Something about Washington loves a good scandal: big or small, true or false, verifiable or unreliable. Like rumors, scandals come in all shapes and sizes. Like rumors, most have some basis in fact, but then increasingly transmogrify by sprouting new appendages, all depending on who is telling the t ale. At the first scent of scandal, the media buzzards start circling and the political grackles start cackling. It’s an almost electric phenomenon that excites the city as rumors grow and take on new life. This whole phenomenon surfaced again recently with, “Signalgate” after an internal executive branch national security conversation among principals over the commercial messaging app, Signal, came to light when a journalist was inadvertently included on the thread. The transcript included details on when airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen would occur, and what type of aircraft and munitions were being used. The suffix “-gate” has often been appended to scandals ever since the Nixon-era Watergate scandal of the 1970s. (The Watergate was the name of the office complex housing Democratic headquarters where President Richard Nixon’s operatives, aka the “plumbers,” were planting listening devices.) The foregoing light treatment of the term "scandal" is not meant to diminish the often serious nature of scandals that do occur. Rather it is intended to caution the curious to tread carefully in analyzing scandals. In the case of Signalgate, three disturbing conclusions emerge. First, if an adversary had had access to the detailed action plans in the conversation in advance of the actual strikes, the lives of American service personnel involved would surely have been jeopardized. Second, the confidence of our European allies in our commitment to that continent was surely undermined by the tone and slant of the conversation. And third, Americans' faith in the competence of our national security apparatus has been shaken considerably. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) observed last Sunday that the administration officials participating in the Signal conversation have all been singing from the same hymnal that President Trump has been using since his days as a real estate tycoon. It all gets down to two words, Christie said: deny and deflect. Deny the incident ever happened or is even significant. If that doesn’t work, deflect attention to another topic or person. The denial is evident in the group’s unified chant that vital classified information was not disclosed, despite outside intelligence experts’ consensus that the exchange should have been labeled, “top secret.” Those caught in a scandal often blame the messenger for the message. In this instance it is Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, into whose lap the unsolicited thread was dropped. He has become the target of the administration's defenders. The president’s press secretary accused him of perpetrating a “hoax,” and the president dismissed him as a “sleazebag.” Never mind that Goldberg was simply conveying the verbatim transcript of the chat conversation, unaltered. He didn't even publish sensitive portions until after the strikes had concluded and administration officials had insisted the action plan was not classified material. Another typical deflection tactic used by those caught up in a scandal is to resort to the passive voice: “Mistakes were made.” Shakespeare called out such attempts to shift blame to mysterious external forces: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.” The biggest surprise about this whole brouhaha is that even experienced Washington hands did not expect the Signalgate scandal to have legs for long. After all, how many Americans know who the Houthis are, where Yemen is, or why the militants’ activities affect U.S. interests halfway around the globe? And yet the sheer incompetence of the key players and their repeated denials that classified information was compromised was enough to cause attentive Americans to sit up and take notice of such peculiar behavior. People did not accept that this was a hoax or fake news. You can only fool some of the people some of the time.   The Watergate scandal demonstrated how serial lying and denial leads to an eventual total collapse of trust after a gradual erosion. Nixon ultimately had to resign from office rather than face certain impeachment and forcible removal from office by Congress.    Signalgate is nowhere close to Watergate, but it is a reminder of how such incidents can escalate as additional evidence is uncovered displacing clever denials and deflections. Some Democrats in Congress are calling for scalps in the form of firings or resignations. But the fact that some Republicans are calling for a full accounting through investigations is a sign that this is no mere game of partisan dodgeball. This is the real deal.  Don Wolfensberger is a 28-year congressional staff veteran culminating as chief-of-staff of the House Rules Committee in 1995. He is author of, “Congress and the People: Deliberative Democracy on Trial” (2000), and. “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays” (2018).   ...read more read less