Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough praised President Donald Trump for “finally” acknowledging that Signalgate “can’t happen again” – calling the position a “great way to start and finish.”
Trump was commenting after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to a Signal group chat by national security advisor Mike Waltz in which senior administration officials were receiving updates on a strike against Houthi militants in Yemen.
In both televised interviews and congressional testimony, Trump officials offered a shifting defense — insisting the messages did not contain classified material, downplaying them as “attack plans” rather than “war plans” and attacking Goldberg’s credibility.
As blame shifted on how the journalist had been admitted to the chat, Trump admitted in interviews on Wednesday that Waltz had “claimed responsibility” while dismissing criticism of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – who shared details of the attacks in the chat – as a “witchhunt.”
During Thursday’s Morning Joe, however, Scarborough was impressed by Trump’s decision to draw a line under the controversy amid his administration’s pushback when he told conservative host of The Vince Show that the administration “can’t have that happen” again.
After playing back the clip, Scarborough gave his take:
All right. You sort through all of that, everything we heard and, yeah, the president finally got to ‘that can’t happen again’ – which is a great way to start and finish, which is ‘somebody in my administration made a mistake’ – which he said at one part and
then a lot of other words. And then ‘that can’t happen again.’But in between that, everybody at the White House, well, not everybody, I mean, [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio. Stood up and spoke out.
Scarborough continued to lambast Hegseth for his response to the scandal in media interviews, which the host said amounted to saying: “Much ado about nothing.”
“When he’s talking about where the. F-15s are about to launch, you know, the target is in range,” Scarborough concluded. “Nobody who’s ever been in national security ever, ever – no general or admiral, no lower ranking officer. Nobody ever talked in 30 years of doing this, from the armed services committee to the Pentagon, going in and out of one White House after another, [nobody] would have ever said that.”
Watch above via MSNBC.