White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy’s six-minute-long video on Wednesday calling for the firing of President Donald Trump’s nationwide safety adviser over a bunch textual content discussing warfare plans.
Portnoy, who endorsed Trump and attended his inauguration, referred to as the scandal, through which Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently added to a bunch textual content message with the nationwide safety crew, a “major, major, major glitch in intelligence and just a huge mistake.” Portnoy stated nationwide safety adviser Michael Waltz ought to lose his job and that Trump mustn’t “pooh-pooh” the scandal.
“You can’t pooh-pooh it,” Portnoy stated in his video. “You can’t downplay it. You have to sit up there and be like, ‘Holy shit, this is a fuck up of epic proportions, there will be accountability, I will get to the bottom of this.’”
When requested concerning the video throughout a press briefing, Leavitt stated that whereas she had “great respect” for Portnoy, Trump has “confidence” in his nationwide safety crew.
Portnoy, who in his video stated he hates The Atlantic as a lot because the president does, added that he understands being loyal to staff, however Trump ought to nonetheless have somebody take accountability for the state of affairs.
“Trump, you may love Michael Waltz, you may love Pete Hegseth, you may love these guys, somebody has to go down,” Portnoy stated. “To me, it’s Michael Waltz. He’s the one who added him to this conversation. But you can’t have the top of the top security people in the United States with the most sensitive information in the world adding random editors of a magazine that hates Trump’s guts to a group chat talking about an attack before it happens on a terrorist group.”
Michael Hickey through Getty Photos
On Monday, Trump stated he didn’t know something concerning the group chat scandal.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he stated. “You are telling me about it for the first time.”
Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth has claimed no warfare plans have been mentioned within the group textual content thread and CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of Nationwide Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard stated there was no categorised data within the chat. On Tuesday, Waltz claimed he didn’t know the way Goldberg was added to the group textual content.
Portnoy stated, “We’ve all texted the wrong person,” however added that most individuals aren’t part of the nationwide safety crew.
“There’s nothing being made up here. Jeffrey Goldberg is telling the truth. It’s obvious these texts are real,” he added. “It’s obvious they’re classified. It’s obvious we gave away the strike information two hours before it happened. We’re lucky it didn’t cause the death of American military members. Somebody has to go down for this.”
On Wednesday, The Atlantic revealed all the texts from the group chat that included planning navy strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
