'Last time': GOP senator warns Trump admin no more 'big and dumb' scandals
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) strongly condemned the Trump administration officials who openly discussed top secret war plans in a free messaging app that included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg.
“It’s not okay,” Cramer said Tuesday. “And any member of Congress, particularly ones that are on important committees or sensitive committees like armed services or intelligence or foreign relations, knows that it's not okay.”
The senator, a Trump ally, called the mishap embarrassing.
“I don’t know if a head will roll or has to roll yet, but this has got to be the last time something this big and dumb happens,” Cramer told reporters.
In a break with President Donald Trump and other top administration officials caught up in the Signal group chat controversy, Cramer insisted in a CNN interview on Tuesday that the error should be immediately acknowledged as “a mistake.” He also commended Golberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, for “holding back” in his reporting some of the most sensitive details he was made privy to.
“Whether you apologize or not, admitting that it was a mistake, I think, is the minimum,” Cramer said. “And I don't think it's difficult, quite honestly. I find it strange that that some people find it difficult.”
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The North Dakota Republican added that administration officials acknowledging the error would be a way for them to “regain the moral high ground, and the issue goes away tomorrow.”
"I’m going to reserve my judgment for the, you know, the final blame, if you will, until a further investigation has happened,” Cramer told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “In the meantime, I think the main thing to do is admit that it was a screw up on somebody's part along the way."
Cramer concluded Tuesday that regardless of how Goldberg wound up on the Signal group chat where top-level government officials were freely discussing highly sensitive war plans, the “issue of the day” isn’t that the journalist was on the discussion “as much as the substance of the discussion should never have happened on that platform.”
“And I'm pretty confident it'll never happen again," he said.