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Rachel Maddow Demolishes Trump Administration’s Handling of Signal Leak: ‘This Is Not Stuff You Should Be Texting About’ | Video
"These guys may not get it, but the American people seem to," the MSNBC anchor says The post Rachel Maddow Demolishes Trump Administration’s Handling of Signal Leak: ‘This Is Not Stuff You Should Be Texting About’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
Rachel Maddow took a wrecking ball Thursday night to the Trump administration over its response to the Signal text leak that looped Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg into a private attack plan chat with multiple high-level federal officials. The MSNBC anchor specifically took a hard look at the administration’s insistence that the snafu in question was not a serious security breach or emblematic of any larger problems.
Many Americans disagree. “The proportion of Americans who say this is a ‘very serious or somewhat serious problem’ is nearly three quarters of respondents — 74% of the country. The percentage of people who say it’s no big deal is only 13%,” “The Rachel Maddow Show” host said, referencing a recent YouGov poll about the issue. “This scandal is a serious problem, even according to 60% of Republicans.”
“On the long list of things that are dumb and bad and potentially illegal about sharing imminent military attack plans on a messaging app with a large group where you don’t know who’s even on there, there is the matter of Trump’s National Security Advisor [Mike Waltz] setting those group chat messages to disappear,” Maddow continued. “The reason that’s a problem is that there are real laws that get enforced about preserving federal records, which belong to the American people. The Vice President and cabinet secretaries in the White House … discussing imminent military strikes definitely counts as a federal record.”
You can watch the full segment yourself below.
Maddow did not stop poking holes in the Trump administration’s nonchalant attitude toward its attack plan leak with Waltz’s message settings. “[U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff] sort of accidentally confirmed publicly that he participated in this group chat on his personal cell phone, not on a government-issued device,” Maddow noted. “That matters because personal devices generally have much less robust cyber protections against things like spyware, which raises a whole new level of security concerns about this.”
“If these guys are doing sensitive, potentially classified government business on their personal devices, if their personal devices have been compromised, then it does not matter what the encryption level is of the app that they are using,” Maddow explained. “If their personal devices have been compromised, it’s possible that any sort of bad actor might have access to every single thing they type or see on their phone. Now we know that at least one of them was participating in this Signal chat about imminent military attack plans on his personal phone. How many of the rest of you were doing that?”
Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that the text chat itself did not contain any truly classified or sensitive information, Maddow pointed to a Thursday report from The Wall Street Journal that says the conversation Goldberg was included in has accidentally revealed the presence of an Israeli intelligence source on the ground in Yemen. “These guys may not get it, but the American people seem to,” the MSNBC anchor concluded. “I mean, three quarters of Americans say this seems like a really serious problem. Anybody can see that this is not stuff you should be texting about with a large group.”
You can watch the full segment in the video above.
The post Rachel Maddow Demolishes Trump Administration’s Handling of Signal Leak: ‘This Is Not Stuff You Should Be Texting About’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
