During a House Democratic Leadership press briefing on Tuesday, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) spoke about House Intelligence Committee Democrats calling for a full investigation into the Trump Administration's leaked Signal chat.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Now I yield to the Ranking Member on Intelligence – oh, I'm sorry, the Ranking Member on
00:05Intelligence, Jim Hines.
00:06Thanks, Petey.
00:07Good morning.
00:08The White House press secretary's efforts, notwithstanding to sweep this scandal under
00:14the carpet, there is a lot of work yet to be done.
00:17Since we learned about the disclosures from Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, the story
00:21has, of course, gotten larger.
00:23We hear press reports that an allied country provided targeting information and that they
00:28were pretty upset about the disclosure of that information.
00:31That is something that we need to follow up on.
00:34And we still, at this point, as the entity charged with oversight of these things, have
00:38no accounting of the breach other than what we've gotten from Jeffrey Goldberg at The
00:43Atlantic.
00:44Now, I know that Mr. Goldberg was being very, very careful in what information he put out
00:49there.
00:50So at this moment, we don't even know what information was in the signal chat.
00:54So again, the White House press secretary's efforts, notwithstanding, the law requires
01:00the Director of National Intelligence to undertake an investigation and to report that investigation,
01:05the results of that investigation, to the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees.
01:09Needless to say, we have seen nothing.
01:13The Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee issued a letter yesterday asking those questions
01:20and asking for an investigation, a real investigation, not something that the White House press secretary
01:24cooks up out of thin air, with those results reported to the intelligence committees as
01:30the law would dictate.
01:31And I'll just point out, before handing this over to the ranking member of the House Armed
01:36Services Committee, it's not just the law.
01:39It's what anyone else associated with the Department of Defense or with the intelligence
01:43community would see done if they, in fact, were putting extremely sensitive information
01:48that should have been classified, if it was not, on an unclassified signal chat here.
01:56There would have been a stand-down.
01:57There would have been a full investigation.
02:00The results and the damage of that act would have been reported, and there would have been
02:06accountability.
02:07This administration has dodged every single one of those steps, starting with an attack
02:11on Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who didn't even ask to be put on the signal chat.
02:15So the message being sent by this, both inside the Pentagon, from four-star officers down
02:21to privates, or inside the intelligence community, from the senior intelligence service right
02:25on down to the recruit, is that you have to play by one set of rules, but our senior-most
02:29people play by an entirely different set of rules, and that is not something we can tolerate
02:34in either the DOD or the intelligence community.
02:37So we will be following up here to make sure that this story is reported to Congress, that
02:41the full damage or potential damage associated with this signal chat is out there, and that
02:48accountability is ultimately visited.