White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was in attack mode on Wednesday as she blamed the media, Democrats, and presumably even some Republicans in the House and Senate for trying to “sow chaos” in the White House with their response to the Signal text chain debacle.
Leavitt spoke at a shortened White House press briefing where she battled with reporters over whether top officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had lied about whether the information included in the text messages published by The Atlantic earlier Wednesday – which included precise attack timings, targets, and information about US assets – was or should have been classified.
During her remarks, she said that the administration’s critics were collaborating in a “coordinated campaign to try and sow chaos in the White House.”
“If this story proves anything, it proves that Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate, and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well. And there’s arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg,” claimed Leavitt.
Leavitt repeatedly referred reporters to statements put out by Hegseth in which he denied that any classified information was included in the text messages inadvertently sent to The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, after he was accidentally included in a group chat on the Signal messaging app where senior administration figures were discussing the upcoming bombing of Houthi targets in Yemen.
Hegseth, meanwhile, dodged a reporter’s question about whether he had gone through the formal procedure to declassify any of the information before sending them to other principles.
The message chain was formed on the day of the attack, March 15, and involved a detailed discussion about US efforts to combat Houthi aggression against US vessels and merchant ships in the Red Sea, including deliberations over Europe’s role in the conflict. Messages sent by Hegseth contained a detailed timeline of when U.S. forces would strike Houthi targets in Yemen, while one sent by Waltz in the moments afterwards described a “collapsed” apartment building belonging to a girlfriend of one of the targets.
Leavitt would go on to ask reporters and viewers whether they “trusted” the word of the secretary of Defense over Goldberg’s, in response to a question about why precise details about an imminent US strike would not be classified — a sign that the White House plans to lean on an old favorite strategy, attacking the media, while completely ignoring the criticism from experts including current and former officials as well as top Republicans and Democrats on various committees dealing with the intelligence community and armed services.
And at one point, the press secretary grew visibly frustrated about questions over whether the president would hold his national security adviser or secretary of Defense accountable for what many experts outside of the administration are calling an unprecedented intel breach.
“If anybody has another question, there’s a lot of different things going on in the world,” an annoyed Leavitt suggested.
“Those are some really s****y war plans,” the secretary wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “This only proves one thing: Jeff Goldberg has never seen a war plan or an “attack plan” (as he now calls it). Not even close. As I type this, my team and I are traveling the [Indo-Pacific Command] region, meeting w/ Commanders (the guys who make REAL “war plans”) and talking to troops.
“We will continue to do our job, while the media does what it does best: peddle hoaxes,” added the secretary, whose previous employer settled for hundreds of millions of dollars after being accused of knowingly peddling false narratives about the 2020 election.
The Defense chief is now facing resounding calls for his resignation from Democrats, who argue that the sharing of such information in the minutes before a strike took place directly put US service members’ lives in danger.
Trumpworld, meanwhile, is circling the wagons while voices on the anti-interventionist right rally in his defense. Some have attempted to center blame on Michael Waltz, the national security adviser to Donald Trump who is seen as a neoconservative by some of Trump’s populist supporters; Waltz was the official who initially set up the group chat in which Hegseth shared the allegedly classified information.
