FILE PHOTO: U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Vice President JD Vance and U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz react as, U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) meets with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte (not pictured), in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 13, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded to the bombshell story that he accidentally shared highly classified defense plans with a reporter by slamming the journalist as "deceitful." But the Trump administration has a far bigger problem on its hands than that, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Monday evening.
For starters, he said, the mere fact this kind of information was being sent over a Signal group chat is astonishing: "I don't know anybody on the Intelligence Committee here that I serve on that would have done anything close to this kind of conversation."
"Speaker Johnson downplayed this. He said that they'll tighten up," said Cooper. "It doesn't seem like there's much — publicly at least — outrage by your Republican colleagues. Obviously, if this was a Democratic administration and this had been Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or anybody else, it would have been a different tune. Are you surprised? Do you expect any kind of hearings here?"
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"Well, Anderson, we have a hearing tomorrow, an open hearing about worldwide threats on the Senate Intelligence Committee. And I can guarantee you that this topic is going to come up tomorrow in an open hearing," said Kelly.
"The CIA director is supposed to be there, right?" inquired Cooper.
"CIA director will be there," Kelly confirmed. "He was one of the individuals on this text chain."
"I think the other thing that I noticed is just the discussion that they were having over Signal," he added. "It was almost like they were deciding to order a pizza. And it's not the kind of conversation you would expect between the principals when they're deciding to commit troops to combat in a foreign country. So I was pretty shocked by, you know, how not — not only that, this was done on this platform on Signal, but also just shocked about the lack of depth in the discussion before sending our Navy pilots over the beach to drop bombs where there is a significant threat."
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