Republican blood pressure in Washington is running even higher than usual this week as they are forced to respond to questions about highly classified defense information sloppily leaked to a reporter earlier this month on a group chat.
One of President Donald Trump’s fiercest attack dogs, US Congressional Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) barked menacingly on Wednesday at a British reporter trying to ask a question about the role that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth played in the breach.
“Should the Defense Secretary...” began Sky News reporter Martha Kelner before Greene cut her off immediately.
“Wait, what country are you from?” Greene demanded.
“The UK,” Kelner responded.
“OK we don’t give a crap about your opinion, and your reporting,” Greene snapped at her. “Why don’t you go back to your country?”
Kelner pressed on, asking Greene if she was concerned about “American lives being put at risk” by the consumer-level encrypted Signal conversation shared with the press, to which Greene replied: “Do you care about people from your country? What about all the women that are raped by migrants?”
(Last year, Politico noted, Green told ex-BBC journalist Emily Maitlis to “f*ck off” after Maitlis asked her about “spreading an anti-semitic conspiracy theory that a California wildfire had been started by a laser beam from space.”)
While the official who inadvertently included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, on the classified chat, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, took responsibility for his mistake, Trump said, “He didn’t need to apologize.”
Trump went on to call Goldberg a “sleazebag” rather than reprimanding his staff for their careless handling of highly sensitive information.
Two other members of the chat, CIA director John Ratcliffe, and his boss, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, appeared before Congress earlier this week and denied that, as far as the US intelligence community is concerned, there was any classified material exposed in the chat.
However, when they were pressed about certain texts from Hegseth regarding weapons packages, personnel and other strategic elements of the surprise attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen, both of them, rather than try to defend Hegseth, said that those questions should be referred to the Department of Defense.
Goldberg in his initial reporting only included snippets of the national-security chat, but after the Trump team this week repeatedly said that there was “no classified information” released in the chat, The Atlantic decided to publish the entire exchange on Wednesday.
“Since the head of the CIA said there’s nothing sensitive, or nothing classified, we just want to make sure you don’t have specific objections to this kind of information going out in public,” Goldberg said.