Despite the evidence, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is still opting to attack and discredit the journalist who caught him red-handed in a seismic national security scandal.
“Can you share how your information about war plans against the Houthis in Yemen was shared with a journalist at The Atlantic? And were those details classified?” a reporter asked Hegseth as he disembarked from Air Force One in Hawaii Monday.
“So you are talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again,” Hegseth said, referring to coverage of the Mueller investigation as a conspiracy, or when Donald Trump said, in the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally, that there were “some very fine people” on both sides.
“This is the guy that peddles in garbage,” Hegseth said, continuing to evade the questions.
Trump administration officials accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat regarding sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen earlier this month. The monumental slip-up was a horrific omen for U.S. national security, whose weakest link is apparently a crew of Cabinet members who can’t accomplish the basic due diligence of double-checking who they’re adding to a group chat hosted by a private company.
Hours later, Goldberg told MSNBC that Hegseth’s response was “flummoxing” to him.
“I haven’t seen this kind of unserious behavior before,” he told the network. “The secretary of defense, with all due respect, seems like a person who is unserious and is trying to deflect from the fact that he participated in a conversation on an unclassified messaging app that he probably shouldn’t have participated in.”
Like Hegseth, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt similarly opted to run the administration’s favorite defense strategy of deny, deny, deny.
In a statement Tuesday morning, Leavitt claimed that “no ‘war plans’ were discussed’ in the group chat and that ‘no classified material was sent to the thread,’” while disparaging Goldberg as a journalist “well-known for his sensationalist spin.”
But that old Trumpian tactic won’t work here—particularly since a spokesperson for the National Security Council, Brian Hughes, already confirmed to Goldberg that the chat was, indeed, real.
For all of the Trump administration’s “unseriousness” about the leak, though, some former government officials were taking it perfectly seriously.
“From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of fuckup imaginable,” posted former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “These people cannot keep America safe.”
The post Pete Hegseth Has Pathetic Defense for That Disastrous Group Chat appeared first on New Republic.
