'Excuse me?' CNN anchor bristles as GOP lawmaker butts in mid-question
CNN's Brianna Keilar tried to pin down the chair of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) over whether he supported an investigation into the leaked war plans chat that inadvertently included a journalist who decided not to divulge the sensitive operational details.
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg wrote Monday of his alarm at being included on the chat that laid out plans for a U.S. military strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen. Others on the chat included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.
On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were grilled by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee about the incident. They kept to the GOP talking points that the information mistakenly shared with Goldberg wasn't "classified."
"I would not use Signal for classified information," Mast said before adding that the information in question was "sensitive" and not classified.
"Keilar asked, "Would you talk about upcoming military operations, weapons that will be used, targets that are going to be hit ..."
"I may, I may," Mast said, interrupting Keilar.
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"Excuse me?" she pushed back at the interruption. She went on, "Including people attacked, sequencing that is going to take place, on Signal?"
"It depends on what you're talking about," Mast said, before launching into a comparison to the 2016 situation with Hillary Clinton's emails.
Mast claimed that if Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deleted 30,000 emails off of a private "server in their basement" he would call for an investigation. But this case, he said, didn't rise "to the level of an investigation like that."
"These are set to delete, sir," Keilar reminded him, before Mast accused her of "trying to conflate something that's not the reality."
Keilar explained that setting the communications to delete was the same as manually deleting them, ultimately asking if Mast would request to see the communications.
"Yes, I will," Mast responded.
After more discussion, Keilar said, "Okay, so just to make sure you just said you will be requesting those communications. That's what I heard you say, is that correct?"
"I don't know if I actually said that or not, but I'm happy to say yes. Yeah, I'm certainly happy to request that. I would like to know myself because, again, the rules are the rules."