THE SIGNALS WERE THERE: President Trump announced Thursday that Mike Waltz will no longer be serving as National Security Advisor and that he is nominating Waltz to serve as Ambassador to the United Nations instead. Vice President JD Vance called it a promotion in an interview with Fox News but rumors have been flying sinceWaltz publicly accepted responsibility for letting the fox into the henhouse by inadvertently adding Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group chat discussing a real time military operation against the Houthis in Yemen. Even though President Trump expressed his support for Waltz, it was becoming clear to insiders that Waltz was being sidelined for the foul. In a sign that the move may have been somewhat sudden, President Trump also announced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was going to be taking on the responsibilities of National Security Advisor in addition to steering the State Department. Sounds like a lotta work. That might be why no one has held two roles like that since the days of Henry Kissinger. Or it could be because of a potential conflict. New York Times Chief White House Correspondent David Sanger wrote Thursday that, “The Kissinger experiment has not been considered a success by most historians” because the National Security Advisor is expected to “help resolve differences among the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, among others.”
CYBER GROUND TRUTH: With tens of thousands of people descending on central California this for RSA’s Cybersecurity Conference, you can imagine how chaotic the streets of San Francisco have been. Microsoft CVP Kelly Bissell broke down the numbers in an exclusive Cipher Brief interview and shared many of the major themes from this year – including; AI-driven defense, the spike in cyber fraud and scams (yes, we’ve all gotten that text message telling us we owe toll fees) and Cloud and Quantum security (why aren’t we talking more about that?). Perhaps most interesting for Dead Droppers though is that Former CISA Director Chris Krebs showed up. Krebs, as you know, is the target of a Presidential Memoranda because he refused to tell the American people that the Biden-Trump election was rigged. As if the memoranda wasn’t enough, officials have also revoked Kreb’s Global Entry status. (We’re not travel agents but we’re gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that he not make any trips to El Salvador anytime soon.) Krebs appearance was the first real opportunity to publicly measure the level of support he’s receiving from the shell-shocked cyber community. Spies tell the Dead Drop that when Krebs showed up for an industry dinner with about 200 guests, they all gave him a standing ovation.
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