Jake Tapper threw up his hands Monday in response to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declaring resolved the issue of top administration officials inadvertently revealing planned strikes in the Middle East to a journalist through a Signal group chat.
“Nothing matters anymore,” the CNN anchor said in a discussion with The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote last Monday how he had been invited into the Signal chat earlier this month by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
Leavitt told reporters earlier in the day that “this case has been closed here at the White House, as far as we are concerned”—despite no firings and no inspectors general from any government department launching an investigation into the shocking security lapse.
Republicans in Congress by and large have also been content to move on, with House Speaker Mike Johnson saying last Monday, “I think it would be a terrible mistake for there to be adverse consequences on any of the people that were involved in that call.”
On The Lead, after Goldberg said how Republicans and current members of the Trump administration would be reacting differently if the compromised chat occurred under a President Kamala Harris, Tapper pointed out there are “so many clips” of Republicans talking about the importance of protecting classified information.
“And we covered [those issues] as legitimate in 2016 with Hillary Clinton’s private server, and that was in no small part why Mr. Trump won in 2016: because of concerns that she wasn’t taking classified materials seriously enough,” Tapper said. “But I guess nothing matters anymore.”
Goldberg said the Trump White House’s playbook has been to “deny and attack,” despite the seriousness of the scandal.
“Obviously if someone nefarious had gotten hold of this [information], they could have warned an American adversary—a terrorist organization—that attempts all the time to kill Americans,” he said. “It’s just poor tradecraft. It’s just poor behavior.”
