'Big vacuum cleaner?' Senator mocks Trump aide over how reporter got 'sucked in' to chat
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) laughed away National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’s new conspiracy theory as he spent Tuesday blaming journalist Jeffrey Goldberg for the stunning national security failure involving the now infamous leak of the Signal group chat.
“Unbelievable,” Klobuchar told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I think this is an unbelievable assertion to make.”
Klobuchar made the remarks in response to Waltz’s floating the idea in a Fox News interview that Goldberg – who he called “a loser” – somehow “deliberately” made his way onto their Signal app group chat where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared top-secret plans for attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen, which happened two hours later.
“And the point is, he did not get – I love this – that he somehow got sucked into this text thing. There’s no big vacuum cleaner there,” she said. “They put him on this text line.”
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The Minnesota Democrat then seized the opportunity to jab Waltz for suggesting that tech billionaire Elon Musk should be consulted about the error.
“My favorite part of all this,” Klobuchar told Cooper, “is that if you notice what Waltz said, he said, ‘We got to talk to Elon about this.' Like Elon Musk is now the White House IT guy who is currently screwing up the entire Social Security system so there's five hour waits and private information is at risk. All of that's going on, and they think Elon can just fix it.”
She said the entire episode following Golberg's bombshell report was “an example of incompetency” and “of putting people involved in national security at risk.”
“I still cannot believe they said this wasn't classified, but they said that under oath,” Klobuchar said.
She concluded that “someone should lose their job over this” and added: “How many other things have they disclosed this way? How many other things have they put out there?”
“This is not what you do with our national security secrets.”