Republican senators angrily walked out of a classified briefing with top military and national security leaders on Tuesday after tensions flared, resulting in Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reportedly dropping the f-bomb while fuming at a general.
One of the officials present at the briefing, which was meant to be about U.S. aid to Ukraine and Israel, was the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Charles Q. Brown. Brown was joined by the secretaries of defense and state as well as the director of national intelligence. The briefing took a turn when GOP members led by Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and James Lankford (R-OK) changed topics to securing the southern border, which some in the GOP want to tie to additional Ukraine funding.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) then reportedly jumped in and asked the GOP senators to stay on topic and keep questions focused on Ukraine and foreign policy. “Then, several Republicans – including Romney – shouted and stood. Irate at the idea that the border was off the table for discussion/questions,” reported PBS NewsHour correspondent Lisa Desjardins.
Desjardins added that Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) then asked Brown something along the lines of “don’t you think we need to be doing this to secure the border?” Brown reportedly replied that border security is not under his purview and a senator then yelled at Brown if he ever been to the border.
Desjardins relayed that Brown then said he was from Texas and the raging GOP senators continued to fume at him with Sen. Graham eventually saying something along the lines of “Can we fucking get someone in here who knows anything?”
Sen. Schumer later discussed the briefing with NBC News saying, “It was immediately hijacked by Leader McConnel. The first question instead of asking our panelists — he called on Lankford to give a five-minute talk about the negotiations on the border. And that wasn’t the purpose of the meeting, at all.”
“One of them started — it was disrespectful — started screaming at one of the generals and challenging him to why he didn’t go to the border,” Schumer concluded.
“People got up and walked out, because this is a waste of time,” Sen. Cramer told reporters afterward, while hardline Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told reporters it was “the most heated briefing in the SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility] I’ve seen.”
“Well, usually senators don’t scream at each other in front of, you know, the secretary of defense and so forth,” Hawley added.
“It started off pretty bad … a lot of tension in the room because nobody talked about the border. In case you don’t have a television or you’ve been living in a cave, you would know that most Republicans feel like we need to address the broken border,” Sen. Graham recalled, according to NBC.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) told reporters that tempers flared with “Schumer running his big mouth, claiming that it was Republicans who, quote, unquote, injected immigration for border security in this debate — and I had none of that.”
“I said: ‘Nope, Republicans haven’t injected border security into this debate. Joe Biden sent us a supplemental bill with border provisions in it.’ He had the misfortune of spreading those lies right after someone had handed me a microphone,” Cotton said of Schumer.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) added, “We want to help Ukraine and Israel, but we’ve got to have the Democrats recognize that the trade here, the deal, is we stop the open border. They don’t want to do that. So Republicans are just walking out of the briefing because the people there are not willing to actually discuss what it takes to get a deal done.”