WASHINGTON, D.C. – On MSNBC, combat Veteran and U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)—a member of both the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) and Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC)—called on Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe and every other Trump Administration official who discussed our nation’s war plans in an unclassified Signal group chat to resign immediately. During the interview with Jonathan Capehart, Duckworth underscored that this was an egregious national security failure that put the lives of our men and women in uniform at greater risk and that every single official in the Signal chat should lose their jobs. Video of the full interview can be found on the Senator’s YouTube.
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Key Quotes:
- “The fact that every single one of those people on [the group chat] was okay with using this non-classified product for multiple days to conduct their war plans shows a complete lack of professionalism and oversight by the people on there. In fact, every one of those people should be fired. They should resign. Pete Hegseth is the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in history, and he is further demonstrating that by actually uploading classified war plans onto an unclassified network. It puts our men and women in uniform in jeopardy.”
- “Why is it that the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA Director and the National Security Advisor…why were all…of them okay with Pete Hegseth uploading this information on an unclassified network? Not a single one of them said, ‘Hey, maybe you shouldn’t be doing that. We should move this to a classified platform.’”
- “Is this how Pete Hegseth is actually running the Pentagon right now? Via Signal? I want to know if he’s transferred information to people in other ways, shapes or forms. Elon Musk was just there in the Pentagon—and they said he didn’t get a briefing on our war plans in case there is conflict with China—but maybe Pete Hegseth slipped him some information on the side, because he sure is playing fast and loose with targeting data and war plans when it comes to this particular airstrike. Look, as I’ve said repeatedly, Pete Hegseth should never have been tapped for this job in the first place. And every single day that he remains our Secretary of Defense emboldens our adversaries, it weakens our national security and it makes America less safe.”
