-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, yesterday, it was reported that classified war plans were leaked by the Secretary of Defense over unsecured text messages. These text exchanges, confirmed by the administration as authentic, included the Defense Secretary, the National Security Advisor, the CIA Director, the Vice President of the United States, and, unintentionally, a journalist with no security clearance.

For the Defense Secretary to coordinate war plans in such a haphazard and dangerous way puts our national security, our troops, and every single American at risk. They intentionally put highly classified information on an unclassified device.

Every single Senator, Democrat and Republican and Independent, must demand accountability. I am calling for a bipartisan investigation in the Senate of this mishandling. I am also calling for the Defense IG to fully investigate. This is too serious not to know exactly what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it from ever happening again.

The Senate and the executive branch have an obligation to fully investigate how this mishandling of sensitive national defense information was allowed to happen. Republicans must not just shrug their shoulders and call this incident ``one of those learning moments''--no, no, no. This is a serious matter--a potential breach of classified intelligence, of imminent war plans against America's adversaries.

The Senate as well as all relevant authorities within the executive branch must investigate this incident fully. We need to know how this conversation was allowed to happen in the first place on an unsecured channel. We need to know the potential damage it could have caused our national security. We need to know how to prevent this from ever, ever happening again.

Any Senate Republican who was up in arms years ago about emails and unsecured servers should be outraged by the Secretary of Defense's carelessness. What if Russian intelligence gained access to this text thread and shared it with their Iranian allies? What if the Iranians had shared it with their allies the Houthis--a terrifying thought, putting American lives, the lives of our Armed Forces, in jeopardy.

At best--at best--Secretary Hegseth showed a colossal lack of judgment. At worst, he put America's national security and perhaps American troops in danger. Once he got caught, did Secretary Hegseth take responsibility for this fiasco? Did he exhibit any kind of leadership Americans expect from the man who may deploy our troops into battle, from the man who may send our family members, our friends, our neighbors into harm's way? Did he show how he would do things differently next time? No, he did not. Instead of accepting responsibility, outrageously, Secretary Hegseth attacked the journalist and called him deceitful. He took the ``deny till you die'' approach even though these messages were already authenticated by the National Security Council spokesperson.

Secretary Hegseth's refusal to accept responsibility yesterday was eerily similar to the way he conducted himself during the confirmation process. I fear how he will react to future moments of crisis. Again, when Pete Hegseth came before the Senate as a nominee, Democrats warned something like this could happen.

These people--Secretary Hegseth and so many others--are clearly not up for the job. We warned that confirming them was dangerous, that they would behave recklessly, and unfortunately--unfortunately--we were right.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source