President Donald Trump abruptly cut off CNN's Kaitlan Collins during a news briefing on Tuesday as she asked a question about the exploding classified security breach scandal.
"Mr. President, you said that your National Security Advisor learned a lesson after a reporter—" Collins began.
"Excuse me, I didn't pick you," Trump talked over her, turning to another reporter and saying, "Go ahead please," to take a different question about the Ukrainian ceasefire deal Trump claimed to have brokered with Russia.
The news broke Monday that a series of high-ranking defense and national security officials in the Trump administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, leaked highly classified active war strategy against Houthi terrorists in Yemen to reporter Jeffrey Goldberg in an unsecured group chat on Signal, has caused an explosion of questions from analysts and policymakers alike of how exactly this happened.
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The response from the administration has been inconsistent and has raised more questions than answers.
Trump, as Collins was attempting to note, told NBC News reporter Garrett Haake that Waltz had "learned his lesson" about handling classified information; however, Hegseth himself, who was reportedly responsible for the leak in the first place, as well as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, both denied the leak happened and claimed Goldberg fabricated the incident. Trump later tried to suggest with no evidence that "sleazebag" Goldberg may have hacked his way into the chat.
The administration's stance only grew more chaotic during an intelligence hearing in the Senate on Tuesday morning, in which Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, claimed the information wasn't classified. She had no answer for why, in that case, it couldn't be shared with the public.
Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe also acknowledged under questioning that they were uncertain about the Pentagon's policy around classified information.
