'A risk to service members': Karoline Leavitt hammered by Fox News reporter on war secrets

Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich grilled White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt after the Trump administration accidentally shared secret war plans with a journalist from The Atlantic.

During Wednesday's White House briefing, Heinrich wondered why Leavitt had insisted that nothing on the leaked chat was classified when it included information like weapons systems and strike launch times.

"So why aren't launch times on a mission strike classified?" Heinrich asked.

"Again, I would defer you to the Secretary of Defense's statement he put out this morning," Leavitt said. "There were various reasons he listed, things that were not included in that messaging thread that were not classified."

Leavitt then shifted to attack The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg for being "a registered Democrat and an anti-Trump sensationalist reporter."

"Putting aside Jeffrey Goldberg, though," Heinrich pressed, "just for American service members who are going to have to carry out these missions in the future, I guess the message that's coming from the response to all this that we're hearing is that nothing sensitive happened, and I guess the logical conclusion of that is that if these messages had gone out publicly prior to the launch, that that wouldn't have been a risk to service members."

"I don't know that they're comfortable with that, so can you explain, had these messages been published, would the plans have moved forward, would the launch have still taken off?" she said.

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The press secretary pushed back by calling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth "an incredible man and a war fighter" who takes "the lives of our American service members with the utmost responsibility."

"We are not going to be lectured about national security and American troops by Democrats and the mainstream media who turned the other cheek when the Biden administration, because of their incompetence, left 13 service members dead in Afghanistan," Leavitt deflected.

"The national security advisor has taken responsibility for this inadvertent number being added to the messaging thread," she added. "But above all, we take the lives of our troops, safety, security, prosperity around the globe with the utmost seriousness."

Watch the video below from Fox News or click here.