'Absolutely bizarre': Congressman stunned by Trump administration's defense of Signalgate

Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) had nothing but scorn on CNN for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's latest defense of the burgeoning "Signalgate" scandal, where active war plans against Houthi rebels in Yemen were leaked to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in a group Signal chat between several Trump administration national security and defense officials.

Hegseth's new argument is to claim that it wasn't even a problem, because in the leaked information, "There's no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information."

"What's your response to that?" anchor Phil Mattingly asked Himes. "Which is not just a Hegseth position, we've heard it from several administration officials."

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"Look, there are any number of absolutely bizarre defenses for this outrageous behavior," said Himes. "You just heard one of them, which is, oh, gosh, it wasn't that specific. Well, it was specific enough that if the Houthis had known that the attack was coming, that there were F-18s involved, that's a very specific airplane, you know, that MQ 9 Reapers were involved, they've shot those down before — they could have moved their assets in such a way to take down one of our pilots. So they're getting all wrapped up in the axle about exactly how specific these plans were."

"And, oh, by the way, was it classified?" said Himes. "I don't know if it was classified or not. It absolutely should have been classified. Oh, is it a violation of the public record, folks, you made a catastrophic mistake that could have killed American servicepeople. So what? I didn't hear Pete Hegseth say — which, frankly, is what needs to be said by all of these folks, especially Pete Hegseth — is, 'Oh, my God, I made a terrible mistake. I am sorry, and we're going to do a study and an investigation to determine what went wrong. It's never going to happen again. And there will be accountability.'"

"All of those things which they would demand of every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine that works for them," Himes added. "They would demand that right off the bat. They haven't yet gotten to any of that. And until they start dealing with this like adults, because it was a very serious mistake — you know, this issue is not going away."

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