Lawmakers Probe Signal-Gate & Conservatives Swatted | 3.27.25

The fallout over a sensitive signal chat continues on Capitol Hill.

While the leaders of NPR and PBS try to prove to taxpayers they aren't funding biased coverage. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley.
It's Thursday, March 27th, and this is Morning Wire. Should the attacks on Tesla cars and showrooms be condemned as domestic terrorism? A senator introduces a resolution on the violence.
We are hopeful that we will get all of our Senate members, Democrats and Republicans, standing in support of this. And conservatives are being targeted in swatting hoaxes.
We speak to an influencer who fell prey to the dangerous trend. This could have ended horribly.
Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned.
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It was a busy day on Capitol Hill with lawmakers continuing their probe into SignalGate and grilling NPR's leaders on bias at the taxpayer-funded outlet. Here with an update is Daily Wire managing editor Tim Rice.
Now, Tim, before we get back into SignalGate, tell us about yesterday's NPR hearing. Yeah, good morning, Georgia.
The purpose of the anti-American airwaves hearing was to determine if NPR and PBS should continue to receive federal funding. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a government-funded company that received $535 million from taxpayers this year, and a lot of that goes directly to NPR and PBS.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who organized the hearing, slammed PBS and NPR, calling them radical left-wing echo chambers that publish biased news reports with government subsidies and push LGBTQ programming intent on grooming children. NPR CEO Catherine Marr admitted under questioning that it was concerning there were no Republicans on NPR's editorial board.
All 87 are Democrats. And she said that NPR was mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner.
But perhaps the most revealing moment came when Texas Congressman Brandon Gill grilled her about her past tweets. Here's part of that exchange.
Do you believe that America believes in black plunder and white democracy? I don't believe that, sir. You tweeted that in reference to a book you were reading at the time, apparently, The Case for Reparations.
I don't think I've ever read that book, sir. You tweeted about it.
You said you took a day off to fully read The Case for Reparations. You put that on Twitter in January of 2020.
Do you believe that white people inherently feel superior to other races? I do not. You don't? You tweeted something to that effect.
You said, I grew up feeling superior. How wide of me? Why did you tweet that? PBS CEO Paula Kerger defended her network, arguing that there's nothing more American than PBS and describing the network as a crucial source of accurate information and educational programming for millions of Americans.
She also insisted her outlet is a fair, nonpartisan, and objective outlet. But here she is being grilled by Congressman Pat Fallon on the number of times PBS used the term far right versus far left.
They found that far right was, that term was used 162 times and far left was only used six times. Do you find that troubling? I don't know the study that you're referring to and I'd love, I'd be very interested in seeing it and understanding how they came up with those numbers.
Media Research Center did a six-month analysis, and it's not, how do you find it? You say far right, it's terms. And a lot of these clips are going viral.
You can see why. So now turning to the signal story.
On Tuesday, the Senate had the floor. Yesterday, the House had their turn.
What did they focus on? Yeah, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard returned to the hot seat, and they were joined by FBI Director Cash Patel. Despite the change of venue, though, yesterday's hearings went about the same as Tuesday's.
The Trump officials defended their actions, and Democrats weren't letting the issue die. Here's Congresswoman Chrissy Houlihan having a heated exchange with Patel.
Now that another day has passed, do you believe that it's now time potentially for the FBI to open an investigation into this? I'm not going to comment on that. Because you're the director of the FBI, you don't believe it's appropriate to comment on that? Because there's a process in place, there's an ongoing litigation and the National Security Council is reviewing this matter.
And I'm not going to discuss any open or closed investigation. That ongoing investigation, literally, the lawsuit happened today or yesterday afternoon.
And the idea that you don't have an opinion on this at this point is frustrating to me. No, it's not.
I'm not going to prejudge any matters. And the men and women of the FBI will call the balls and strikes.
Reclaiming my time. Not you.
Now, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has taken responsibility for this. And initially, the Trump administration was standing by him.
Is that still the case? Yes, it is. And in fact, the White House is actually going on the offensive, noting that in a follow-up article, The Atlantic characterized the contents of the signal chat as attack plans, which the Trump administration says is less serious than the original war plans.

So clearly the White House isn't going to back down on this.

Tim, thanks for reporting.

You bet.

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Amid a wave of vandalism targeting Tesla and Doge, Republicans in the Senate are bringing a resolution to condemn what they say is an orchestrated domestic terrorism campaign empowered by leftist groups. Joining us now to discuss the targeting of Tesla is Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who is bringing that resolution.
Senator, first of all, thank you so much for joining us. Sure.
So I wanted to start with Tesla. We've seen some left-wing violence against Tesla properties, and shockingly, we've seen legacy media seem to almost promote this.
Some major figures, in fact, directly promote this. What action is Congress and specifically the Senate taking here? Yes, we will take up my resolution which condemns these attacks against Tesla.
It should be on the floor of the Senate on Wednesday or Thursday. And what this resolution does is to say that the Senate stands against these horrific attacks of violence, destruction, domestic terrorism against electric car owners, charging stations, dealerships, maintenance facilities.
Now, the term domestic terrorism carries a lot of weight here. Is this an attempt to basically force the Democrats to go on the record on this issue? Is there a reason you feel that that is, in fact, necessary?

I think it is stunning that we are seeing this take place and that Democratic leadership is not standing up and calling out these acts of domestic terrorism. We have lived through four years where every time you turned around, they were talking about domestic terrorism.
They were calling parents that went to school board meetings, domestic terrorists. They were calling individuals that would stand across the street from a Planned Parenthood and pray for the women and the unborn children.
And they would call that domestic terrorism. And now we are going through this where they're actually firebombing and shooting up Tesla dealerships and nothing is being said.
So we think it's appropriate that we have the resolution and we give them the opportunity to stand up and say we condemn these attacks. Now, we've seen some reports and Elon Musk has highlighted some of these, that this is a very organized protest effort and also has some big money behind it.
Do you have any specific information on that? What we have read and what we hear is that they are doing this because of their hatred for Donald Trump and their disdain for Elon Musk and his role in setting up the Department of Government Efficiency. We are trying to root out all waste, fraud, and abuse that is happening to the taxpayer dollars that are going in to fund and support a federal government structure.
Now, the leftists have to have a big government structure to survive. That is their mother's milk, if you will.
And you can look at the last four years of the Biden administration and the amount of money that went into some of these absurd NGOs, non-governmental entities or nonprofits such as Stacey Abrams, climate justice nonprofit. All that money needs to be clawed back.
It needs to be used to pay down our $36 trillion debt. And then we need to remove all of this, actually codify all of this out-of-control spending, get it out of the budget and have it gone forever.
Well, let's hope we see an end to this string of vandalism. Senator, thank you so much for joining us.
Of course. Conservative influencers are being swatted, a dangerous hoax where someone falsely reports a serious crime to law enforcement and causes them to show up at a person's house fully armed.
The hoax has been around for decades and has led to death and injury. Here to discuss the current round of swatting is Daily Wire senior editor Ash Short.

So Ash, even CNN is reporting on this.

On the 20th, they reported that more than a dozen Trump-supporting influencers

have been swatted just in the past two weeks.

So who is on that list?

Well, it was an eclectic group of social media influencers,

including Gunther Eagleman, radio show host Joe Pagliarulo, and InfoWars' Chase Geyser, just to name a few. But it also included some high-profile names like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Senator Tommy Tuberville.
Social media influencer Matt Van Swole was also victimized. He's the former liberal who gained a following in the past six months advocating for Hurricane Helene relief in North Carolina.
We spoke to Matt about his experience. We thought, you know, maybe someone was doing a wellness check, the power was going in and out all night.
And it turns out that the police had gotten a phone call from someone pretending to be me saying that there had been a shooting at the house, that Aaron had been shot and killed, that I had been shot in the leg, and that there were three masked men hiding in the basement. And for them to come in, break down the door, come in guns blazing to get the bad guys in the house.
And of course, we had no idea what was going on. Our three kids were home.
They were asleep upstairs. They had no idea what was going on.
The police officers were obviously very confused when they got to the house. So it was just a crazy thing that occurred.
Now, thankfully, no one was injured during this attempt. Matt said that he thinks the fact that his wife answered the door is part of the reason.
The 911 call that brought police to his house indicated that Matt's wife had been shot. So her answering the door immediately told the officer that something wasn't right with the call.
The police officer who arrived first on the scene did so without backup. He was very brave.
He was trying to come save me and kill these bad guys. But, you know, had I answered the door and seen what Aaron saw, which was there was no police lights on in the car, there was a man with his gun drawn at the door, I probably would have attacked this person.
It was, again, two in the morning. And Aaron just had this sense of mind to remember that people were getting swatted and was able to diffuse the situation very carefully.
And the police officer immediately, once he saw Aaron, knew there's a woman at this house. She's not been shot and killed.
You know, I should diffuse the situation. So shout out to the police officer.
He did an incredible job. Now, as we mentioned at the top, sometimes this can be deadly.
Right. In 2015, a police officer was shot during a swatting hoax.
He survived and the homeowner who shot him was cleared of any wrongdoing.

But in 2017, a police officer shot and killed a man after two of his gamer buddies called in the hoax over an online bet. One was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and the other received 15 months

for his role. And in 2020, a 60-year-old man had a heart attack when someone attempted to swat him.

The person responsible was sentenced to five years in prison for the crime. Now, have there been any arrests for these most recent events? Not yet, but Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and SBI Director Kash Patel have both said they were looking into the attacks.
And Senator Mike Lee of Utah also suggested that those responsible should be charged with attempted murder. Matt Van Swold just wants those responsible to be brought to justice,

but he also hopes the country can just calm down.

So I'm very thankful, but I do want to see some action.

I want to see people arrested.

That would be great.

Now, is there any reason why Matt and some of these other conservative influencers were targeted,

or are they just popular on X?

Well, the woman behind the Data Republican account found that conservatives that have been swatted had some things in common. The most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing is that the most important thing found that conservatives that have been swatted had some things in common, the most important of which is that they are regularly interacted with or promoted by Elon Musk.
Some, not bad, have ties to Infowars or War Room or have spoken out against the war in Ukraine. Well, a very dangerous prank.
Ash, thanks for reporting. You're welcome.

Thanks for waking up with us. And if you enjoyed what you heard this morning,