CNN's Jake Tapper was gobsmacked by Vice President JD Vance's insistence on Fox News that the transfer of Mike Waltz out of the national security adviser role into an ambassadorship is unrelated to his role in the Signalgate scandal.
Waltz was part of the unsecured group chat in which highly sensitive military attack plans against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen were leaked to a reporter from The Atlantic. However, the scandal has mainly focused on the role of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was implicated in a second such leak just weeks later.
"Just moments ago on his favorite channel, Vice President JD Vance addressed the exit of Mike Waltz from the national security advisor role and moved to nominee to be U.N. ambassador," said Tapper. "Vice President Vance insisting that this was the plan all along."
"We brought Mike on to do some serious reforms in the National Security Council. He has done that," said Vance in the clip. "I like Mike. I think he's a great guy, he's got the trust of both me and the president. But we also thought that he'd make a better U.N. ambassador as we get beyond this stage of the reforms that we've made to the National Security Council ... if the president wanted to fire him over the Signal thing, which, by the way, was a total nothingburger of a story, he would have just done it."
"'A total nothingburger of a story.' What a wild thing to say," said Tapper, turning to former Obama administration Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to weigh in.
"Well, you know Jake, I think one of the big problems with the president and the vice president, and the administration generally, is that they just don't speak the truth to the American people," said Panetta. "They're always looking for an excuse. They're always looking to blame somebody else. They're always working to kind of downplay some of the most serious mistakes I've ever seen in terms of security breaches. And I just think in the end, the American people just don't trust what they say. And I certainly don't."
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