At a House Democratic press briefing on Tuesday, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) spoke about the investigation into the Signal usage by the Trump national security team.
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NewsTranscript
00:00I have plenty of questions for you, I don't know, on other topics.
00:18Congressman Smith, there is an independent investigation that your colleagues in the
00:22Senate have asked for on a bipartisan basis with the DOD Inspector General.
00:27There's an acting Inspector General right now in the Department of Defense.
00:30Obviously, we know the Trump administration's attempts to kind of overhaul the Inspector
00:35General process.
00:36Do you have confidence in that investigation that it will get these answers that you're
00:41looking for?
00:42I do not.
00:43First of all, I mean, President Trump fired all of the Inspector Generals, as we know,
00:47including the one at DOD, and I think he made it very clear what he expected out of them.
00:52Now, will the Inspector General's office uphold their integrity?
00:56I hope so.
00:57But clearly, there's pressure there.
00:58I mean, you can analogize this a little bit to the Eric Adams case, where I forget how
01:02many Department of Justice people quit rather than carry out the order to drop the charges
01:08against Eric Adams until they found someone who was willing to comply.
01:12Is the Inspector General's process going to be legitimate in light of the Trump administration's
01:17clear effort to fire people who don't give them the answers they want?
01:20I think the answer to that question is highly in doubt.
01:23Number one.
01:24Number two, Inspector General's process, they take time.
01:27Even when it's working properly, it takes time.
01:29This is an ongoing threat.
01:31As I said, if they keep doing operational security in this manner, we are in jeopardy,
01:36which is why the quicker thing to do would be for the House and the Senate Armed Services
01:40Committee to bring DOD in and have that conversation, preferably in public, but if they don't feel
01:47like they want to have the public conversation, do something classified so that we can begin
01:51to get an idea of how they're fixing the problem, which is a long way of saying, I
01:54think the IG process is highly in doubt because of what Trump has done to it and because in
01:59the best of times.
02:00It takes more time than the urgency of this matter, I think, demands.