Ex-Trump aide trashes Pete Hegseth for failing to brief the president on lost soldiers
"The View's" Alyssa Farah Griffin is incensed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth isn't briefing President Donald Trump on recent U.S. defense and national security events.
Griffin, who previously worked as Trump's White House communications director, played a clip of Trump being asked about the four missing soldiers in Lithuania. Trump confessed he'd never heard about it.
The U.S. Army said on Wednesday that its search continues for four U.S. soldiers "after their vehicle was found submerged in a training area," reported Reuters.
"So right now, four U.S. soldiers are missing from a training mission," said Griffin.
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Joy Behar commented, "He doesn't know anything about it."
"The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, his job would be to brief the commander-in-chief on the status of U.S. service members whose families are waiting to hear details, and Secretary Hegseth didn't do the bare minimum of his job, which would be to brief the president on this," said Griffin.
"Then to go a step further, I am—I am losing my mind over the fact that they're treating it like Jeffrey Goldberg was the problem, and the most scandalous part was [that] a journalist was added," she continued speaking about the "Signalgate" scandal. "It was you using a nonclassified, open-source technology on your personal cell phone to share — what any military expert not named Pete Hegseth would say was — classified information."
Earlier this week, a bombshell report in The Atlantic alleged that Hegseth shared secret war plans in a Signal chat while inadvertently revealing them to a reporter who had been errantly added to the group.
The administration responded by denying that any classified information was transmitted through the chats, and The Atlantic responded Tuesday by publishing messages showing that Hegseth revealed the precise times that American missiles were scheduled to strike at Houthi rebel groups inside Yemen.
"So, Hegseth fails on both things. You're not briefing the commander-in-chief about actively missing U.S. service members, and you didn't care about the safety and security of those who carried out the mission," Griffin said.
Whoopi Goldberg wondered if perhaps "they're not briefing Hegseth."
See the segment below or at the link here.