'Two perfect months?!': Trump's rationalization of insecure group chat scandal backfires

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So she is a special government employee. Just two and a half weeks after Trump was sworn in for this term as president, he put out a press release announcing proudly that she would be a, quote, special government employee and senior advisor of the newly created White House Faith Office.

In that role, I guess, she would now like you to send her $1,000.

You can receive these seven supernatural blessings for you and your house.

According to Exodus 23, God will assign an angel to you

His name is Jesus. You can receive these seven supernatural blessings for you and your house.
According to Exodus 23, God will assign an angel to you. He'll be an enemy to your enemies.
He'll give you prosperity. He'll take sickness away from you.
He will give you long life. He'll bring increase in inheritance and he'll give a special year of blessing.
You're not doing this to get something, but you're doing it in honor to God, realizing what you can receive. Ministry takes money.
And if you have the ability to stand with us, I'm going to ask you to put your faith during this very holy time, because I give just to give, and I pray there are others. But also know we want to get you some special gifts.
We want to give you some very special gifts.

This is the head of the White House Faith Office.

She is a special government employee of the Government of the United States of America.

And she does have some very special gifts for you.

But you're going to have to do your part, too.

Luckily, you can do your part, meaning you can send her money in a lot of different ways.

You can send her money online. You can send her money by phone.
It's a toll-free number. You can send her money by text.
You can send her money by scanning her QR code, or you can just stuff some money into the PO box. Lots of ways to give.
Toll-free. Write, text to give, or go to paulawight.tv.
With your best Passover Easter resurrection offering of $125 or more, Paula wants to send you a special olive wood communion set from the Holy Land. That's what you get if you send $125 to the head of the White House Office of Faith Programs.
Again, she is a special government employee of the United States. She is asking for your money.
But I got to tell you, I watched the whole pitch. They're not really going for the $125 gift.
That is not the target. They want you to know that the big stuff, the really miraculous stuff, kicks in when you give her $1,000.

For your special Passover offering of $1,000 or more as the Holy Spirit leads, you will also

receive the beautiful 10-inch Waterford Crystal Cross. Don't miss your moment to release seven

Thank you. Passover offering of $1,000 or more as the Holy Spirit leads.
You will also receive the beautiful 10-inch Waterford Crystal Cross. Don't miss your moment to release seven supernatural blessings and provision into your life.
Don't miss. This is what comes with the $1,000.
You see, that's the sort of, not fine print, but the kind of dim print there above the banner on the bottom. Is the Holy Spirit moving you to give a very special offering? By very special, they mean four digits at least.
And what they mean by this is, you know, are you feeling the itch to send this U.S. government employee, the head of the White House Faith Office, a thousand dollars or more? If so, congratulations, because that is how you get all this stuff, including the special year of blessing and a long life and taking your sickness away.
For the low, low price of $1,000 payable by text or online or on the phone, toll free, or scan the QR code, or send your check to a P.O. box in Orlando.

She's got a government job. And hard sell, big money, pay me for miracles televangelism is as old as television.
In this case, YouTube evangelism is almost as old as YouTube. But when it's from the White House, when it is a person hired as a special government employee of the U.S.
government, someone running an office in the White House while selling miracles on the side, well, that's a whole new day for governance. You know, when it comes to trying to achieve a long life and take sickness away, I will say it's nice to know that at least someone in the White House is working on those things, even if they are charging for them.
You may be able to buy those things by sending $1,000 to the head of the White House faith office. But know when you're doing so that the U.S.
government itself will no longer be working toward those aims in the material world.

What I mean by that is today the Trump administration announced that it is cutting all funding

immediately with no warning for the vaccination efforts that we have supported in poor countries

for decades.

Quote, the United States is planning to terminate more than a billion dollars in funding for

life-saving vaccinations for millions of people each year in some of the world's poorest countries. Quote, was set up 25 years ago, the loss of U.S.
support may mean 75 million children do not receive routine vaccinations in the next five years, with more than 1.2 million children dying as a result. This is vaccination for polio and M-pox and measles and, and, and.
And the United States government is cutting that off without warning because America first, right? Because it is definitely in America's interest to make sure that preventable infectious diseases like measles and polio are rampant and unconstrained all over the world. Like it or not, we have taken a global leadership role in vaccinating against these plagues for decades.
And so us unilaterally pulling out with no warning immediately leaves no capacity for these things that anybody else can match. And so, like I said, polio, tuberculosis, measles, em-pox, all of these things shall be expected to blossom immediately as a direct result of what Donald Trump is doing.
I mean, obviously we'll be fine here in America, right? None of these things ever cross borders, right? So who cares? Here in America, how are we doing with our own out-of-control measles outbreak? Well, we're working on that too. Headline, Trump administration abruptly cuts billions of dollars from state health services.
Trump administration, quote, has abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states. State health departments started receiving notices on Monday night that the funds were being terminated, again, without warning, quote, effective immediately.
The notices said no additional activities can be conducted and no additional costs may be incurred as it relates to these funds. State health officials predicted that thousands of health department employees and contract workers could lose their jobs nationwide.
Some predicted the loss of as much as 90% of staff from some infectious disease teams. For some, the effect was immediate.
In Lubbock, Texas, public health officials have received orders to stop work supported by three grants that helped fund the response to the widening measles outbreak there, according to the city's director of public health. Stop work immediately, Lubbock, Texas.
Lubbock, Texas, President Donald Trump is cutting you off effective immediately. What was the phrase? No additional activities can be conducted.
No additional costs may be incurred. So Lubbock, Texas, your work on the measles outbreak, that needs to stop right now effective immediately because of Donald Trump.
Remind me where Lubbock, Texas is in relation to this measles outbreak? Oh, yeah. See the really big circle there? Right there on the edge of the giant measles outbreak in Texas, Lubbock is right there at about 2 o'clock on that big circle of cases around Gaines County.
Donald Trump just cut off their funds to try to stop the measles outbreak, which has now spread from Texas into New Mexico, into Oklahoma, and it appears possibly it is also spread into Kansas. If it's not spreading from Kansas, excuse me, if it's not spreading into Kansas from Texas, it looks like Kansas might have its own.
But even as President Donald Trump, in his infinite wisdom, is cutting off funds to stop efforts against measles and tuberculosis and polio abroad and making state health departments here at home immediately fire as much as 90% of their infectious disease staff while we are dealing with exploding measles outbreaks here domestically. One thing, of course, we can still offer from our government is the hard-won expertise of the U.S.
government, right? We at least, even though Trump is cutting all of this funding with no warning, immediate cutoff, no advance planning to account for any

of this stuff. Even with all of those funds being cut off, at least the United States government

can still offer its wise counsel on how to contend with, you know, wildly contagious,

deadly infectious diseases. Headline, remedies supported by Kennedy leave some measles patients

more ill. After the Trump administration's health secretary promoted vitamin A as a cure, parents in West Texas began giving their children high doses of vitamin A.
Quote, doctors in West Texas are seeing measles patients whose illnesses have been complicated by an alternative therapy endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Trump administration's health secretary.

Parents in Gaines County, Texas, the center of a raging measles outbreak, have increasingly turned to supplements and unproven treatments to protect their children, many of whom are unvaccinated. One of those supplements is cod liver oil containing vitamin A, which Mr.
Kennedy has promoted as a near miraculous cure for measles. Physicians at Covenant Children's Hospital in, yes, Lubbock, Texas, now say they have treated a handful of unvaccinated children who were given so much vitamin A that they have signs of liver damage.
Quote, there is no credible evidence that vitamin A helps prevent infection in children in the United States where vitamin A deficiencies are exceedingly rare. In fact, at high doses, vitamin A can cause liver damage.
It can cause dry, peeling skin and hair loss, and in rare instances, seizures and coma. So far, doctors at West Texas hospitals have said they've seen patients with yellowed skin and high levels of liver enzymes in their blood work, both signs of a damaged liver.
Health officials say the recent popularity of vitamin A use for measles can be traced back to a Fox News interview with Mr. Kennedy, in which he said he had heard of, quote, almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery with treatments like cod liver oil, which he said was the safest

application of vitamin A. In the weeks after the Fox News interview, drugstores in West Texas struggled to keep vitamin A and cod liver oil supplements on their shelves.
And now because Donald Trump's health secretary has said that's what you do for measles, parents are inadvertently poisoning their children and giving them liver damage. With this miraculous cure that the Health and Human Services Secretary went on TV and promoted as a miracle, despite, you know, science.
The government of the United States of America under Donald Trump firing the infectious disease doctors and cutting off funding to fight, for example, specifically the measles epidemic. But now there's kids in Texas with liver damage because Donald Trump's health secretary got on the fox and said he found a miracle cure.
And why wouldn't you trust him? He was handpicked by Donald Trump. That said, if you do want to take sickness away and live a long life, you can always just send $1,000 to the head of Donald Trump's White House faith office.
She will take your check or cash or whatever. So tonight we're going to be joined by Tammy Duckworth, Democratic U.S.
Senator from Illinois. She is a veteran of the Iraq War who lost both legs when her helicopter was shot out of the sky in combat.
Senator Duckworth is demanding the resignation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the fallout continues to mount from the revelation that Pete Hegseth endangered American pilots. Pete Hegseth and Trump's national security advisor and his director of national intelligence and his CIA director and his secretary of state and his treasury secretary and his White House chief of staff and his advisor Stephen Miller and his vice president J.D.
Vance and more. Apparently it was a cast of 18 senior officials all together who all joined a commercial messaging app group chat on which they circulated things like the name of a serving CIA officer supplied by CIA director John Ratcliffe and, per Pete Hegseth, this handy TikTok of the exact battle plan describing when specific American piloted planes and drones and then sea-based Tomahawk missiles would be used down to the minute for forthcoming strikes in Yemen.
Pete Hegseth helpfully pointed out to the group that at 2.15 p.m., all caps, quote, this is when the first bombs will definitely drop. Remember their defense here that they did nothing wrong here is that there was nothing specific on this group text.
No actual plans. Definitely not down to the minute talking about when the actual bombs will drop.
In this group text, over signal that accidentally included a journalist. But no one noticed even after he took his name out of the chat when he realized these were actual senior government officials discussing apparently classified and definitely sensitive defense information.
And being part of this kind of conversation is not something anyone should do. President Trump has not fired anyone for this debacle, which is astonishing.
He did confess to NBC News in a new interview that he sees this as a, quote, glitch.

A glitch.

He said this scandal has been, quote, the only glitch in two months.

This is kind of emerging as his take on this scandal.

He told reporters yesterday, they've made a big deal out of this because we've had two perfect months.

Essentially saying that this scandal with all of his senior appointees, including his White House chief of staff,

I'm not. perfect months.
Essentially saying that this scandal with all of his senior appointees, including his White House chief of staff, all discussing these forthcoming battle plans over Signal in a group text that they didn't notice included a journalist. He thinks this is all a hoax.
This is now he's used the phrase witch hunt. This has all been ginned up as if it's something bad.
They're trying to make it look bad because he's otherwise had two perfect months. This is the only thing that even looks bad.
Everything else has been. And, you know, I will just say between you and me, you have been alive for these past two months and you have experienced what the first two months of this Trump term have been like.
Do you think that Trump is right, that it's all been totally perfect? This has been the only glitch? I mean, just, you know, back of the envelope scratching here. It was a week or so after he was sworn in, January 29th, a jet carrying 64 people hit an army helicopter above the Potomac River outside Reagan National Airport in D.C.
Everybody on both aircraft killed. The day before that collision, he had offered air traffic controllers all across the country a somewhat threatening buyout, trying to basically beg them to leave government service.
Less than a week later, Trump reversed course. Oh, actually, no, maybe that's a bad idea.
Air traffic controllers, please don't leave. That same week was when we started to get the headlines about the kids who Trump's top campaign donor, Elon Musk, had brought in to his new agency to work with him to destroy the federal government.
Turns out one Doge staffer actually had to resign when it came out that he had a since-deleted social media account in which he had advocated for loud and proud racism and racial human breeding tactics through eugenics. They soon hired him back.
Another Doge staffer had been previously fired from a cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets. He also worked at a startup that hired convicted hackers.
He went by the online moniker Big Balls. We would later learn that Trump and Elon Musk in their infinite wisdom specifically gave Big Balls, who again had been fired from a previous job at a cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets, Trump and Musk gave that specific kid access to the systems at the top U.S.
cybersecurity agency. Great choice.
Then Trump fired the staff of the nation's nuclear security agency, the people who oversee the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile. Then Trump scrambled to unfire all of those nuclear safety workers because oops, but in many cases, they couldn't figure out how to reach them because in their infinite wisdom, they forgot to collect contact information from those nuclear security workers before cutting them all off from their government email accounts.
This includes people with Q-level security clearances who are cleared for access to our nation's top nuclear secrets. Those are great folks to lose track of and to fire for no cause.
Trump then fired people at the CDC in charge of tracking the ongoing bird flu outbreak. That turned out to be a mistake as well.
They then tried to hire all those people back, but didn't get them all back. Trump then instituted not only firings, but a hiring freeze that applied to, among other things, the national parks.
Why is it particularly bad to do that at the national parks? Well, among other things, the national parks every year have to hire a whole new cast of employees for seasonal employment because the national parks have greatly increased visitors during vacation season. Hiring freeze isn't going to work at the national parks, right? You have to hire lots of new people every year.
So they did that. And then, oops, turns out they realized they couldn't do that.
Turns out it would be wildly dangerous to radically understaff American national parks. Who knew? So they had to reverse that too.
Then a few days after that reversal, we saw them again scrambling to rehire people they had fired from the FDA this time. Headline, FDA scrambles to rehire entire teams overseeing medical devices after Doge fired them all, saying their terminations are, quote, rescinded effective immediately.
By this point, we're about a month in to the perfect two months. It was February 22nd, just about exactly a month in, when Elon Musk sent his first what-did-you-do-last-week email.
He demanded that all federal employees email his Doge teenagers a list of what they got done that week, or else it would be cause for immediate firing. That threat then promptly was deflated.
Within 24 hours, the leaders of multiple agencies in the government, people in Trump's cabinet, like Tulsi Gabbard, say, told their workers and their agencies explicitly don't reply to Elon's email. At that point, Elon Musk had a running list of all the massive and spectacular savings he and his kids at Doge had found by cutting out supposed fraud and waste from the federal government.
They claimed to have found billions of dollars in fraud. It was all on their website for you to see.
But then February 25th, the New York Times reported that the five largest items on that list had just quietly disappeared because it turns out they hadn't actually saved all that money. They'd just done all the math wrong.
Day after the rug was pulled out from under Doge on

that, they had to erase another big cut from their list. Doge claimed they had found $2 billion of waste and fraud to cut out from VA.
Turns out a lot of that money was for stuff like, oh, I don't know, medical services for veterans, cancer programs for veterans with cancer, burial services for veterans who die. Boy, that really does sound wasteful, right? So yeah, again, oops, they had to reverse course on that, reinstate some of that stuff.
Saturday after that was March 1st. We learned another obvious but alarming side effect to all of Trump and Musk's firings through the federal government.
CNN reported that U.S. intelligence showed that Russia and China were rushing to take advantage of the moment and working hard to recruit as many disgruntled workers as intelligence assets as they could get.
You tired of all the winning yet? You tired of all the perfection? The very next day, Sunday, March 2nd, the Dow started its trip off the cliff after Trump said he was going to go through with his tariffs on our closest trading partners, like Mexico and Canada and also China. The next day, you could watch live on the Fox News channel as the stock market tumbled down and down and down while Trump doubled down, down, down on his tariffs.
Since then, we've seen industry after industry come forward to say just how much the tariffs have been just slaying them economically. But Trump is plowing ahead a week after tanking the stock market with that incipient trade war.
Trump pulled yet another reversal. Since taking office, he's been insisting on using military aircraft for deportations, been making a huge deal about these deportations, deporting migrants, many of whom we now know had no criminal history whatsoever.

But he wanted to make a big deal out of the fact that he was using military aircraft to send them where? To Guantanamo.

Very transparent stunt to get footage like this to use for propaganda purposes.

It was also unbelievably, eye-wateringly expensive.

So quietly, on March 5th, they stopped using the military aircraft. And a week later, they stopped using Guantanamo.
They returned everybody they'd been holding there back stateside. Because they'd already got all their propaganda films made.
Don't tell anybody we're just not doing that anymore. Along the way, in their hunt to rid everything in the federal government of diversity, equity, inclusion, they purged a photo of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan from a Defense Department database.
We believe that's because the plane, the Enola Gay, has the word gay in its name. So obviously just having pictures of that plane anywhere is going to make everybody gay.
Look what it did to me. the next week people still employed by the fda and ordered back to the office told reporters

they had returned to find offices that could not fit them with broken equipment and not enough chairs for people to sit in. Last week, Trump released the JFK assassination files, unredacted, including 400 unredacted social security numbers and birthdates and birthplaces.
Trump managed, among other things, to dox his own lawyer who only found out Trump had done it when a reporter called to ask him about it. Also, last week, The New York Times was first to report that Elon Musk was about to get, the very next morning, a top secret briefing for the U.S.
military plan for any war that might break out with China. After he says he saw that report, Trump, quote, contacted White House Chief of Staff and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to ask them, hey, what's this briefing you're doing for Elon? That sounds like a big deal.
He learned about it in the New York Times, he says. And so then they called it off.
And briefly, that was a, you know, stop everything, what the heck is going on news, right? The president's top campaign donor with all of his business ties to China and his multi-billion dollar debts to the Chinese getting a briefing on the U.S. military plans for going to war with China.
But I mean, just to show you how these first two months of the Trump term is going, here's the news from the very next day. After Trump announced there would be no such Elon Musk China war plan briefing, this is the Washington Post Saturday, March 22nd, just four days ago.
Tax revenue could drop by 10% amid turmoil at IRS. Staff cuts and disruptions related to Doge have officials bracing for a sharp loss of revenue for the U.S.
government. The prediction officials say is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Trump's rapid demolition of parts of the IRS.
Rapid demolition. Neat.
Seems like Doge, if those predictions seem to be borne out at IRS, will have succeeded in robbing the United States government of a half trillion dollars in revenue it would have otherwise received because, again, in their infinite wisdom, they have decided to destroy the IRS, which collects money to fund the government. Everybody who's ever run a business knows that the most efficient thing you can do in getting your bottom line straight to your business is to make sure you no longer have the capacity to earn any money.
Right? It's been perfect. These two months have been, other than this little glitch with the giant group text about forthcoming military operations, everything has been perfect.
I will mention just today, the Social Security Administration has announced that they are not going to go ahead with the changes they'd previously announced that would force millions of retired and disabled Americans to go in person to a Social Security office to do things that they can now do by phone while they are simultaneously closing social security offices and firing their staff. Turns out, per the Washington Post tonight, they had not done any training to prepare their staff for this giant change, which they were going to implement as of Monday.
They also had not actually done any work to set up the new system that they were going to try to shunt these tens of millions of Americans into. Washington Post notes today that the people who might have been called upon to invent and implement such a new system have mostly all been fired from the Social Security Administration, so there's nobody there to do that work, and so the thing will be delayed.
The headline here, though, is right. Trump administration, quote, backs off plan to cut phone services after backlash.
I mean, yeah, sure, they hadn't actually done anything to prepare for it, but it's not like they'd be afraid to go ahead with what they were doing because it wasn't well planned. What about the last two months tells you that? What happened here is that the backlash mattered.
People being outraged and pushing back mattered and stopped them. They say they still want to go ahead with these planned changes at Social Security in two weeks instead of Monday.
We'll see about that, but for now the pushback has worked. Trump announced new 25% tariffs on car sales today, which sent the futures for America's auto company stocks well off the cliff tonight, as Trump inflicts yet more economic pain on American businesses, on American consumers, and the country as a whole.
Tomorrow, Trump is sending his vice president to Greenland, which he is threatening to take by force. The trip was supposed to include the national security advisor, Michael Waltz, but now it's unclear whether Mr.
Waltz is going after the group tech scandal, which he apparently started. This trip to Greenland was also initially supposed to be just the vice president's wife and child and not the vice president himself.
But after Greenland's politicians of every stripe expressed outrage over this trip and its implied intimidation and Greenlanders announced plans to hold anti-American demonstrations at the site she was expected to visit, including the airport she was due to fly into. Now they're sending the vice president himself.
And he and his wife are not only going, excuse me, and he and his wife will only be going to a U.S. military base and not to anywhere else in Greenland where the actual people of Greenland might be able to get within screaming distance of them because, again, oops.
So, you know, in other words, these perfect two months just continuing on their perfect trajectory. Tammy Duckworth joins us here live next.
Stay with us. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.
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Hey, everyone, it's Chris Hayes. This week on my podcast, Why Is This Happening, Beverly Gage, author of G-Man, J.
Edgar Hoover, and the Making of the American Century. Hoover created this playbook of how you could use an institution like the FBI to intimidate your enemies, to gather information.
And then on the other hand, he's actually nothing like Kash Patel because Kash Patel is so open about being loyal to Donald Trump in particular. He calls him King Donald.
And Hoover was a very different creature. That's this week on Why Is This Happening.
Search for Why Is This Happening wherever you're listening right now and follow. The first 100 days, bills are passed, executive orders are signed, and presidencies are defined.
And for Donald Trump's first 100 days, Rachel Maddow is on MSNBC five nights a week.

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Eastern on MSNBC. Donald Trump's Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, isn't working out all that well.
And it started right at the beginning. Right after he was sworn in, there was the mid-air collision of a passenger jet and an Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., despite the strict and solemn rules of the Defense Department that say no information about deceased service members can be made public until 24 hours after the next of kin has been informed, Pete Hegseth nevertheless blurted out to the public the ranks of the three helicopter crew members who had just been killed in the crash.
Hegseth also blurted out that the crew members had been performing a training flight on a, quote, continuity of government mission. Mr.
Hegseth, quote, was later told that he should not have publicly disclosed that it was a continuity of government mission, which involves U.S. officials and military forces practicing how the government would react in the event of an emergency.
Just a couple of weeks later, Mr. Hegseth took his first big international trip as defense secretary, went to a big NATO meeting in Europe, and he began the trip by just totally flummoxing not only our allies, but also a lot of Washington.
When he again just blurted out that any peace deal in the Russia-Ukraine war would have to include Ukraine giving up lots of its territory and abandoning its bid to join NATO. That caused major blowback for obvious reasons.
He was just giving away Ukraine's major bargaining chips even before negotiations had started. When that blowback made its way to him, Pete Hegseth sort of angrily asserted that he had basically been the victim of his own comments.
As it pertains to NATO membership not being realistic outcome for negotiations, that's something that was stated as part of my remarks here, as part of a coordination with how we're executing these ongoing negotiations. That's something that was stated as part of my remarks here.
I don't know who stated it,

but it was part of my remarks. I did not state it.
It was something that was stated

by something inside my mouth in my remarks time. It's very offensive to me as well.

Now we're all living through Pete Hegseth's latest and greatest. Why were those details shared on Signal and how did you learn that a journalist was privy to the targets, the types of weapons used? I've heard I was characterized nobody was texting war plans and that's all I have to say about that.
Thank you. Nobody's texting more plans.
I know exactly what I'm doing, exactly what we're directing. And I'm really proud of what we accomplished.
Nobody's texting war plans. You know who sees war plans? I see them every single day.
I looked at them this morning. Nobody's texting war plans.
I know exactly what I'm doing. I know what war plans look like.
War plans, I see them all the time. I eat war plans for breakfast.
I wouldn't know war plans. What do you mean? I wouldn't know if there were war.
Meanwhile, headline, here are the attack plans that Trump's advisors shared on Signal. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine today releasing the entirety of the Signal message chain that he was somehow inexplicably added to, in which top Trump administration officials texted in detail about forthcoming airstrikes in Yemen.
And despite Pete Hegseth and other officials in the chat saying there was no classified information and definitely no war plans, here is Pete Hegseth texting on a private messaging app to a group including a reporter, times and weapons and attack sequences about two hours before the first bombs exploded. Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Army helicopter pilot who lost both legs in combat, she now serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
She had this to say today in response. This is an official statement released by her Senate office.
I will warn you, it contains a thinly veiled swear. The statement says, quote, Pete Hegseth is a effing liar.
This is so clearly classified info

he recklessly leaked that could have gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.
Senator Tammy Duckworth joins us here next. Subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.
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Sign up for MSNBC Daily at MSNBC.com. This is Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, combat veteran member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, today responding to Trump Defense Secretary Pete Hegsetheth claiming there was nothing wrong with sharing detailed information about upcoming airstrikes in a private messaging app to a group that inadvertently included a reporter.
From Senator Duckworth, quote, Pete Hegseth is a effing liar. She didn't say effing.
This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could have gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.
Joining us now is Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. Senator, thank you so much for being with us tonight.
I appreciate you making the time. Thanks for having me on, Rachel.
Such an important issue that you're covering. We first learned about this about midday on Monday.
It's now Wednesday night. We have learned more of the last couple of days about what happened in this group text about these forthcoming strikes.
This is a very strong reaction that you have had to it. It's not only profane.
It is it's it's mad. You're angry here.
Can you explain your reaction to it and why you think Senator Hegseth, why you think Secretary Hegseth should resign?

I think he should resign because he put those pilots in danger. If you look at the text chain, that's my response was immediately after I read the actual text chain that showed him putting up on this unsecured platform.
the drones are going to strike and then he put down exactly how long

it was going to be until the F-18s were going to be over the target area. If anybody had compromised that chain, those pilots could have been in danger.
And that's why I was so upset. And I use my army language in that text because he is the guy that's leading the military and he put those pilots in direct danger.
And by the way, this if I were our allies, if I were the UK or any of our allies, I would think twice about sharing intelligence with us in the future. Because we've shown that our secretary of defense, our national intelligence community does not know how to safeguard classified information.
Let me ask you about the classified portion of this. Obviously, there's potential criminal liability here whether or not this was classified information.
But we've also had these blunt assertions from the president, from other White House officials, from Mr. Hegseth, saying that there was nothing that was classified or that could be construed as classified information in the text.
We know what Mr. Hegseth, saying that there was nothing that was classified or that could be construed as

classified information in the text. We know what Mr.
Goldberg has published. We know that the NSC says that they've verified that this was the actual text chain.
Does it seem to you that this is classified information? It absolutely is. Any type of targeting information, sequencing of the attack, that's automatically classified.
And that's why I called him a liar, because he's been saying there was no classified information. And then this text chain gets published, and we see clearly that it is classified information, and that it directly put those pilots in danger.
Once all of those people on that text chain, and there were 18 or 19 people or something on it, once all of those people started seeing the type of information that was circulating, again, on a commercial app, non-government device or non-government system, certainly not a classified information system, what kind of responsibility did they all have? Because I'm struck here by Michael Waltz, the national security advisor, having started this text chain and having apparently added the reporter to it. I'm struck by the fact that Mr.
Hegseth made the decisions that he made to post what he did to this chain. I'm struck by the fact that the CIA director posted the name of an active intelligence officer.
But I'm also thinking about Stephen Miller in the White House and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI and all of these other. The secretary of treasury was on this for some reason.
All of these people, once they realized the type of information that was on this chain, if they were responsible with that type of information, what should they have done?

And who do you think is most culpable in terms of their behavior here?

Well, that is why I say they should all lose their jobs, because they needed to have spoken

up as soon as he put that information on there and posted the information about the sequencing,

what the strike was going to be, what platforms were going to be used, tomahawks, drones,

F-18s, for example. Someone on that chain should have said, hey, this is not the correct platform.
Let's switch over to the SIPRNet. And not a single one of them, not a single one of them spoke up.
That is egregious dereliction of duty in terms of their jobs. They needed to have spoken up, especially those who are in the intelligence community.
And don't tell me that they don't know that. You've got Tulsi

Gabbard, who, you know, claims that she's a combat veteran and she has all this experience.

You've got the CIA director, who at one point was also the DNI at one point in the previous

administration. These people know better and not a single one of them spoke up, which is why they're

all culpable. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, member of the Armed Services Committee, thank you for your clarity on this.
Thanks for making time to be with us tonight, Senator. It's an honor to have you here.
Thanks. Thanks for having me on.
All right. More news ahead tonight.
Stay with us. So it's an odd numbered year.
It's 2025. It's March.
This is like the definition of when you don't get any news about elections. But last night we had two big results out of two elections in the state of Pennsylvania, which are a big deal to Democrats.
The first one was in the House, Pennsylvania House. Democrats won an election there that will hand them control of the state legislature, the House in Pennsylvania.
Now, that race in the state House district, that was considered a Democratic-leaning district. Kamala Harris had won that district in November by like 16 points.
So it's not a surprise that the Democrat won. That said, though, there still was a good news surprise for Democrats in that race, because even though Harris had won that district by 16 points, last night the Democrats candidate in that district won by nearly 30 points, which is a huge margin to take even in a blue seat.
And that alone would have been a reason for Pennsylvania Democrats to be celebrating today.