“They really seem like they’re drunk with power, and there’s a kind of arrogance about what we witness in this chat.”
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined CNN’s OutFront with Erin Burnett to slam the Trump administration’s reckless and irresponsible handling of sensitive national security details.
View the full interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On the administration’s deflection of accountability:
President Truman was “The buck stops here.” Donald Trump is “The buck stops anywhere but anywhere near me.” That effort at deflection, “I really don’t know. You know I wasn’t involved.” He’s now claiming Hegseth wasn’t involved. It is really pathetic. But what it tells all of us, what it tells the national security professionals, what it tells people in the Pentagon, what it tells the American people is there will be no accountability in his administration. He isn’t going to hold people responsible. He doesn’t want to fire people. He doesn’t even want to talk about it. He wants to put this off as another witch hunt, another hoax — his kind of go to deflection. “But don’t look at me, whatever you do America, I’m not responsible.” That’s just going to breed further mistakes.
We can’t have any confidence this could be rectified if all of those people on that chat are basically saying “There’s nothing to see here. Okay, yeah, it should have been classified.” They can’t even admit that. Jim Himes properly read the very guidance that the intelligence community gives on a discussion exactly like this one. And the DoD guidance, although Tulsi Gabbard tried to deflect, is almost exactly the same. This was heavily classified, or it should have been, and there’s no escaping that.
On the inappropriate behavior of top White House officials:
It is very bizarre how they chose the people on this chat. It was almost as if Waltz wanted to sort of brag to this crowd of people what was going on with this operation. But you’re absolutely right. There are a whole lot of people with no need to know. It is yet another element of why this was so poorly handled, and that is, they shouldn’t have been talking about this on Signal. It should have been highly classified. They should have had nowhere near the participants in this conversation, even in a classified space. And then to essentially deny or try to denigrate the seriousness of this means that they’re not going to address it. It is the sign of both the inexperience and incompetence of a lot of these people. Hegseth, way out of his depth, he passed by a single vote. That vote was JD Vance in the Senate coming in to break the tie — that has not aged well.
But more than that, I look at someone like Ratcliffe, who does have at least some modicum of experience, and nowhere in the chat does he say, “Hey, people, we shouldn’t be talking about this on a commercial app.” Tulsi Gabbard had no experience. She has no business being there either. But for Ratcliffe, it was even more inexcusable, because he knows better than this. But none of them are willing to really contradict the misuse of power. They really seem like they’re drunk with power, and there’s a kind of arrogance about what we witness in this chat. Arrogance towards our allies, arrogance towards national security protocols that should be followed, just incompetence and arrogance, which is a dangerous mix for the country.
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