One of the men in charge of running America's money had a Venmo account so public that reporters were able to track his payments going back years — including the one marked only with an eggplant emoji.
In the aftermath of The Atlantic's revelation that its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been accidentally added to a Signal groupchat by national security adviser Mike Waltz, reporters around the world have gone digging to see just how bad the Trump administration's operations security practices really are.
As it turns out, incredibly sloppy. It's been easy to find all kinds of data about the people running this country — including, as Wired reports, their Venmo accounts.
After breaking news that Waltz's Venmo had been public, the magazine revealed that other officials had seemingly also not locked down their accounts on the payment app. In fact, at least four of the men whose Venmo accounts were openly available had also been in Waltz's "Houthis PC small group" chain.
Among them was Dan Katz, the Treasury Department's chief of staff. The account Wired believes to be Katz's not only had its contact list visible, but was also linked to the official's wife.
The strangest part, however? A 2018 payment sporting an eggplant emoji in its "note" section.
As anyone who has used Venmo can attest, putting silly emojis and other goofy missives on payments to friends is par for the course. It's far more likely that Katz was just messing around than that he was paying someone for their "eggplant" — though of course, it wouldn't be the first time a prominent politician had been caught in such a predicament on Venmo (in fact, just-retired president Joe Biden had his own Venmo embarrassment a few years back.)
Regardless of the meaning behind the emoji, however, it's absolutely unreal that a ranking official in the department that's quite literally is in charge of America's money had his own financial transactions public and visible like that. It's bad enough that all these national security and military guys are getting caught with their pants down, so to speak — but for a Treasury official to do so as well suggests a staggering degree of recklessness in the highest echelons of the government.
That department and the others implicated in the story didn't respond to Wired's attempts to talk, so we can't know with 100 percent certainty that the account was really Katz's. If we had to place a bet on it, however, we'd wager it was legit.
If this scandal has taught us anything, it's that these people don't know how to use their privacy settings.
More on the Signal debacle: Pentagon Issued Warning About Signal Messaging One Week Before Its Head Was Caught Using It
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