“It shows both the level of incompetence but also a certain kind of arrogance that some of the folks on that had to know that they should never be discussing these things on a Signal chat.”
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki to blast the irresponsible planning of sensitive military operations over text chat and call out the utterly incompetent handling of national security interests following The Atlantic’s reporting.
View the full interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On the incompetence and arrogance of Trump’s national security advisors:
It is stunning. I can understand Jeffrey’s disbelief, or thought that is, this somehow contrived, because it is so stunning and so incompetent and so dangerous in terms of the planning for this operation and who might have been on this text chain. But what really leaps out at me is that you have the Director of National Intelligence, you have the head of the CIA, and no one it appears bothered to say, “Hey, folks, should we really be talking about this here? Should we really be using an unclassified channel to talk about an operation, a detailed military operation, that’s going to take place in a few hours?” That is just so striking to me, and it shows both the level of incompetence, but also a certain kind of arrogance that some of the folks on that had to know that they should never be discussing these things on a Signal chat. But there is a feeling that they’re beyond accountability. I mean, who’s going to hold them accountable? They can break whatever rules. They’re stopping the FBI from doing background checks on people. They can deal with national security however they see fit.
[…] Just staggeringly irresponsible. And it’s not just that they had a reporter by accident on this chat. They should have never been doing this on a chat to begin with. And what’s more, who knows what phones they were using? Who knows the safety and security of those phones, whether a foreign government had already penetrated some of those communications? So, the dangers are real. There should be a real accounting over this. But you could expect more of the reaction you saw from Hegseth, which is to attack the reporter rather than acknowledging their own dangerous incompetence here. It put pilots at risk potentially. But also it meant that the success of the operations could have been dramatically reduced if, for example, word got out to not just the Houthis, but allies of the Houthis, like Iran, that could have tipped them off – “Hey, here’s when these attacks are going to start. Here’s when you’ll know that the next target is upon you.” It’s just staggeringly irresponsible.
On the shocking lack of concern over the communication of national security interests:
There certainly could be a criminal offense here. This is information that in a normal world would be highly classified. And so someone could have very plainly violated laws in terms of the handling of sensitive national security of information, even if it isn’t classified. But I think to your point, also, my guess is that this is probably the tip of the iceberg. This was probably not the first time that the people on this chat used Signal to communicate information that – if not highly classified – was highly sensitive national security information. So, who else is doing this? Apparently, it certainly appears to be widespread, because no one on that chat seems to have objected to it or even raised the issue.
Now, I know we don’t know the full conversation, because Jeffrey was careful to limit what he made public to protect the legitimate national security interests of the country, even if the participants in the chat weren’t protecting it. But if nobody was objecting, that means that there was a certain routine already in this administration to use such poor trade craft.
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