When you’re caught, no point in lying

Or, in the case of the nation’s capital these days, you have to work to be so dishonest with a straight face. Even when caught with the evidence on their phones, officials deny their own typing and emojis.

They need to learn when to plead guilty. That’s a lesson I can teach.

We generally locked our house in Chicago when I was a teenager. Not because it was a rough neighborhood, and not because we had anything valuable in the house. I’m not really sure why. I never thought much of it, but I knew it was a sign of responsibility when my parents gave me my own key.

Except I would lose it, a lot.

Like the time I ran home in between doing other things and realized I did not have my key. Being an impatient teenager, and long before cell phones, I didn’t want to wait for someone else to get home and let me inside. So, I adapted.

I knew the chain lock on the basement door wasn’t very strong. I went around back and broke into my own house.

I figured I could reattach the chain to the wooden frame and no one would ever know.

But remember, I was an impatient teenager. Not only did I forget my key that day, I forgot to go back into the basement to fix the lock before I picked up what I needed and ran out of the house to meet my friends.

I forgot all about it until I came home later and my parents were there, along with the police. My parents had come home from work, discovered the busted basement door and called the police.

Oops, I said, I had broken in and forgot to fix the door. I don’t recall anyone’s exact words, but I do remember no one was laughing.

So when the vice president of the United States, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Director of National Intelligence and multiple other high-level officials of the Trump administration type away on an unsecured chat service about a U.S. attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen, and when they later learned that the dumbo who set up the chat had sloppily and mistakenly included a journalist in the group chat, you would think they would admit the serious error.

Nope, even with the broken door as evidence, they said it was not a security breach.

Even though they had discussed plans for the attack on a foreign nation. Even though they had detailed the aircraft that would be used and when they would take off to hit their targets. Even though the evidence was in front of their faces on a big screen at a congressional hearing.

A National Security Council spokesman called the unsecured chat group a “deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.” Like it’s thoughtful to broadcast and brag on a party line about secret military attacks.

Yet the chatterers stuck to their story: No security breach, no crime, no foul. Nothing more to talk about, they said.

I should have tried that attitude on my dad and the police. Though I doubt it would have worked. They weren’t as gullible as half of Congress.

Larry Persily is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel.