Former Pentagon official on war plans group chat: ‘There’s going to be a fallout’
Former Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said late Monday that she believes there is going to be ‘a fallout” from revelations that top Trump administration officials created a group chat for war plans and mistakenly invited a journalist.
Singh, who served under the Biden administration, joined NewsNation’s “The Hill,” where host Blake Burman asked what she expected to happen moving forward after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added to a chat in which plans to attack Houthi rebels in Yemen were discussed.
“I mean, look, this is not a good news story for anyone, so of course, they’re punting it to the White House,” Singh said.
Shortly after the news broke, stunning Washington, President Trump said he knew nothing about the group chat and slammed The Atlantic, calling it a failing magazine.
“Regardless of the statements that Donald Trump makes, there’s going to be a fallout,” Singh said. “And I think … Democrats in Congress really need to look at this closely. I mean, this certainly opens up the aperture for an investigation.”
Democrats have quickly criticized the administration after it was revealed national security adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President Vance discussed specifics about the Houthi operation via Signal instead of official government channels.
Former Obama Justice Department official Matthew Miller called for the FBI to investigate the incident, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has called on Congress to investigate what happened.
Singh warned of the seriousness of working on highly classified information via Signal, noting that “anyone could have intercepted” the messages even if the app is encrypted.
“That doesn’t mean that it’s a completely safe classified system,” she said.
“So, he put our fighters, our U.S. military men and women at risk by sharing it in this threat,” Singh said of Hegseth. “And frankly, all of them are guilty of that, and that’s what really stuck out to me.”
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