Jeffrey Goldberg: Hegseth Thinks “We Are Idiots,” Anyone Else Would Have Been Fired Or Court-Martialed Over “Signalgate”
Editor of “The Atlantic” and host of “Washington Week” on PBS, Jeffrey Goldberg delivered a blistering monologue on Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s “terrible week.”
JEFFREY GOLDBERG, ‘WASHINGTON WEEK’ HOST, ‘ATLANTIC’ EDITOR: The Trump administration’s self-styled secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, has spent most of the week on defense, facing accusations that he committed war crimes and that he endangered the lives of U.S. pilots. At the Pentagon, it seems to be all turmoil all the time, next. Good evening and welcome to Washington Week. On Thursday, the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense released his report on Signal Gate in which top national security leaders discuss secret military information on a commercial messaging app with, not to put too fine a point on it here, me. The inspector general found that Defense Secretary Hegseth’s behavior endangered the safety of American pilots and that he should not have been using a commercial messaging app or his own phone to share secret information about upcoming airstrikes. In response, Hegseth and his spokesman, Sean Parnell, denied that the report said what it said. This is what Parnell wrote. The inspector general review is a total exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and proves what we knew all along, no classified information was shared. This matter is resolved and the case is closed. Hegseth himself tweeted, total exoneration case closed. Here is what the inspector general actually wrote. The secretary’s transmission of non-public operational information over Signal to an unclear journalist, that would be me, and others two to four hours before plan strikes using his personal cell phone exposed sensitive DOD information. The secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots. Hegseth, Parnell and other administration officials are claiming that these findings represent a total exoneration. Let me be blunt here. These people think we are idiots. I try not to express my personal views from this chair, but since Signalgate happened on my phone, let me say that the most disturbing aspect of this whole episode is that if any other official at the Department of Defense and certainly any uniform military officer shared information 1 in 100th as sensitive as Hegseth and others shared on an insecure messaging app, without even knowing that the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic was on the chat, they would be fired or court-martialed for their incompetence. That’s what I have to say about that. To find out what others have to say about this and about the growing controversy regarding Hegesth’s use of the military to fight alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean, let me bring in three experts, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, Nancy Youssef is a national security correspondent at The Atlantic. Thank you all for joining us. So, it’s been a terrible week for Pete Hegseth. Objective reality suggests that. We know the secretary of defense is a hard job, but, Peter, a lot of these wounds seem self-inflicted.
