Tariff’s ain’t gonna make this go away as Trump turns on National Security Advisor Waltz…..
This thing got media ‘legs’…..
President Trump decried concerns over the transmission of military plans on the messaging app Signal as a “witch hunt,” borrowing the language of persecution that he has applied to the many investigations that have targeted him and his campaign over the years as he sought to deny the seriousness of the leak, the New York Times reports….
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“Texts by President Trump’s advisers about whether to attack Houthi militants in Yemen underscored the ad hoc nature of the administration’s national security deliberations, a mode that has sometimes left allies bewildered and his own aides at odds,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Other presidents have relied on the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council staff to develop and filter options in an orderly manner. The Trump team has operated in a far less orthodox fashion, one that stems from the president’s impatience with debate and skepticism of bureaucracy. Many of his top advisers, few of whom have held senior positions before, share that perspective.”
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‘A lot of people’s BS meters are going to go off’: GOP deals with Signalgate
President Donald Trump bills himself as a straight shooter who tells it like it is.
But as the imbroglio over the administration’s accidental leak of military strike plans to a journalist spilled into its third day, even some allies were calling BS.
The White House on Wednesday maintained its assertion that there was no problem with national security adviser Mike Waltz accidentally including a journalist from The Atlantic magazine in a group chat in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared details about an impending attack on Houthi fighters in Yemen. But their arguments were quickly unraveling around them
Some staunch Trump loyalists are frustrated at being spun by an administration they have long heralded for its commonsense, no-holds-barred approach, with some inside and outside of the White House agitating for Waltz to take the fall for his mistake.
While Trump rarely admits mistakes, many of his allies said Wednesday that’s exactly what the White House needed to do and that it was undermining trust by refusing to acknowledge reality.
“The White House is in denial that this was not classified or sensitive data,” said Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican and former Air Force officer. “They should just own up to it and preserve credibility.”….
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White House scrambles to contain Signal chat fallout….
The White House on Wednesday scrambled to contain the controversy of a Signal chat among national security officials that became public, opting for its signature defiant approach but one that left even some Republicans scratching their heads.
After The Atlantic published messages from the chat, which editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to, administration officials went on the attack against the publication and downplayed the significance of the revelations….
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Still, the publication of the messages and the subsequent response raised difficult questions for the administration and its handling of the entire episode. The situation was complicated by a Senate hearing on Tuesday in which Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were adamant that no classified information was discussed in the Signal chat.
Even some Republicans were not buying the White House’s defiant messaging…..
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The Trump playbook is typically to aggressively fight back against any controversy and weather the storm. But the furor over the Signal chat is unlikely to go away any time soon…..
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