‘It’s an embarrassment': Trump officials grilled over leaked war plans
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were hammered by Senate Democrats on Tuesday, for their participation in a text chain in which Trump administration officials were planning a military strike in Yemen. The unsecured group chat potentially opened the military up to harm had foreign adversaries hacked into their devices.
Ratcliffe and Gabbard struggled to defend their conduct as Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee peppered them with questions about the text chain during a hearing on worldwide threats that the two intelligence officials were long scheduled to appear at.
The timing of the hearing was fortuitous for Democrats, as just one day earlier a bombshell report from the Atlantic said that Gabbard and Ratcliffe, along with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and other Trump administration officials were texting plans for a military strike in Yemen via the messaging app Signal.
The scandal is only known because the Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently added to the chain, in which he said the officials discussed likely classified material in violation of multiple federal laws.
But both Gabbard and Ratcliffe refused to take responsibility for their actions during the contentious hearing.
“Director Ratcliffe, this was a huge mistake, correct?” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) asked during the hearing.
When Ratcliffe replied with a curt “no,” Ossoff went off on him.
“A national political reporter was made privy to sensitive information about an imminent military operation against a foreign terrorist organization, and that wasn’t a huge mistake?” Ossoff said. “This is an embarrassment. This is utterly unprofessional. There’s been no apology, there has been no recognition of the gravity of this error. And, by the way, we will get the full transcript of this chain, and your testimony will be measured carefully against this content.”
Gabbard and Ratcliffe also repeatedly denied understanding national security rules, and said they did not recall aspects of the conversation even though it happened just a few days ago.
You can watch Gabbard struggle to come up with ways to avoid telling the truth about the conversation in this exchange with Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ).
In another terrifying exchange, Ratcliffe said he was “not aware” that a Trump adviser on the chain was in Moscow while the administration leaders were discussing plans for the attack—meaning that the discussion was vulnerable to Russian espionage.
“This sloppiness, this incompetence, this disrespect for our intelligence agencies, and the personnel who work for them, is entirely unacceptable,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) yelled at Ratcliffe. “It’s an embarrassment. You need to do better. You need to do better.”
Republican lawmakers, for their part, have defended the likely illegal and glaringly dangerous fuck up by some of the highest-ranking Trump administration officials.
But Tuesday’s hearing shows that Democrats are not just going to let this go, even if Republicans and the right-wing media cabal want the scandal to die.
Democrats are calling for heads to roll, and have said that they will ensure a serious investigation will take place to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure it never happens again.’
“If this was the case of a military officer, or an intelligence officer, and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired,” Warner said in his opening remarks.“I think this is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly towards classified information,” that the Trump administration has exhibited.