Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe “lied” under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee when denying classified information was included in a Signal group chat on military strikes against the Houthis.
Co-host host Mika Brzezinski said, “Senator, do these text messages that are now released by The Atlantic, by Jeffrey’s reporting, answer some of the questions that you couldn’t get answers to yesterday?”
Warner said, “Well, it sure answers the question that the two witnesses, I believe, lied when they said, ‘Oh, nothing to see here, nothing classified.’ One of the witnesses tried to hedge a little bit later about, well, this may be defense classified, but you would have to be an idiot not to understand what Jeffrey just laid out is at a huge classification level that if it had fallen into enemy hands and the Houthis had been able to realign their offenses, American lives could be lost.”
He added, “And the reason why I say it’s a pattern, in the first two weeks of the administration, they inadvertently released the names of 200 new CIA agents. Those individuals, if their identities are known, they can’t be put into the field now. That’s hundreds of thousands of dollars of training beyond screwing up those people’s lives. There’s not a day that goes by that you guys don’t report another one of the DOGE boys in one of classified agencies giving up personal information. This is a pattern of sloppiness and incompetence that I think reflects this administration’s approach, at least towards sensitive information.”
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