Transcript: Trump Text Fiasco Worsens as Brutal Details Wreck Fox Spin
Brooks: It’s hard to take anything she’s saying seriously because of course she knows what was said in that Signal chat, and of course she can tell the difference. Or I would hope to God that as the director of national intelligence that she has a basic understanding of what kinds of information tends to be classified and what kind isn’t. And the notion that she would go, Oh gee whiz, well, I don’t know, I guess you’d have to ask the secretary of defense whether this is classified…. If she doesn’t know then she is not qualified for her job, and if she does know then she is part of an egregious security breach.
Sargent: I think there’s no question about it. She was clearly totally flummoxed and didn’t know what to say. I want to move to Fox News for a second. Fox’s top propagandists all have spun wildly about this. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters documented, Laura Ingraham blamed the prominence of the story on left-wing networks. And on her show, Senator Josh Hawley laughably tried to dismiss this as “griping about who is on a text message and who is not.” Jesse Watters tried to laugh it off, saying, “Did you ever try to start a group text? It’s hard.” And Sean Hannity claimed that the media just wants to distract from Trump’s supposed accomplishments, and he called the media “state-run.” I think he maybe forgot, Rosa, that the state is actually in the hands of Trump and his allies right now. But that aside, this spin seems almost desperate to me. What do you think?
Brooks: Oh, sure. Yeah, we all, and we absolute can, empathize with adding the wrong person to a group chat. Of course we can—which is why if you are the director of national intelligence, secretary of defense, and the national security adviser, you are not supposed to discuss war plans in a text group chat over commercial app. Duh, right? That is why you’re supposed to do it in a SCIF, a secure compartmentalized information facility. That’s why, if you’re doing audio or video calls, you’re supposed to be using secure audio and video technologies that are run and maintained by the government. That’s why you have 16 tedious layers of double-checking of everything before you have those conversations. Yes, it’s a pain in the butt, but the whole point of all of those boring procedures are to make sure that you don’t do exactly what they did do. So saying, Boy, it’s confusing to start a group chat? Yes, that’s the point. That’s why you don’t do this stuff over group chats
