Sen. Lankford to Newsmax: Signal Chat Furor 'Much Ado About Nothing'

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Wednesday on Newsmax that his takeaway from Tuesday's testy committee hearing was that "much ado" is being made "about nothing" in regards to the furor over President Donald Trump's Cabinet's leaked Signal chat.

"We're in an annual worldwide threats hearing where we're talking about Iran and about China and about the threats that are coming at our nation from cartels in Mexico, and the obsession on the Democrats were, 'Tell me a little bit more about this internal chat,'" Lankford told Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "I will tell you, every single one of the senators there has a group chat about something where they're talking through logistics, talking through ideas and such."

The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg said Monday that he was accidentally included in a conversation among senior White House officials who were discussing the administration's plans for military action against the Houthis in Yemen. The group chat took place on the Signal messaging app.

Lankford pointed out that the Signal conversation was taking place "on an encrypted app" and that those involved "were not discussing classified information."

"In fact, they specifically said, 'Hey, there are some things we need to talk about on the high side,' that is in a classified setting on it, so it was very obvious that they're saying there are some things classified and some things just sensitive on it," he said. "Those sensitive things they can talk about in an encrypted setting — that is allowed. The difference was a reporter was in the middle of this, and he leaked it out, and it's created this whole environment."

The story that's getting buried by the brouhaha over the Signal chat is that Trump has taken action to halt the Houthi attacks on U.S. vessels, Lankford said.

"I think everybody is missing the fact that President Trump is stopping the Houthis from attacking American warships when under [former President Joe] Biden, they attacked American warships 174 times, and Biden hardly responded to it," Lankford said. "[Biden] just let the Houthis attack us over and over again. President Trump has said stop — that's really what this story is about."

Despite the Intelligence Committee hearing being hijacked by the news of the Cabinet text chain leak, Lankford said he got the answers he was looking for on Iran and the effectiveness of the reinstated sanctions.

"We actually have two tiers of questioning for this," Lankford said. "That's the nice part about being on the Intelligence Committee. We have an open setting where we talk about issues that can be talked about in a newspaper, basically, or out publicly on social media, and then we have a classified setting that we started immediately afterward. We go a little more in depth at that point. … The Intelligence Committee doesn't tell the administration how to do it; we do oversight. … So, there's a lot of back and forth with the administration, and it was a very open, good conversation."

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