"Heads should roll": Congress erupts over stunning Trump admin leak
Why it matters: Some Democrats are already calling for an investigation and potential repercussions against the national security officials involved in the lapse.
"This is an outrageous national security breach and heads should roll," Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement to Axios.
He added: "We need a full investigation and hearing into this on the House Armed Services Committee, ASAP."
"We can't chalk this up to a simple mistake — people should be fired for this," said Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), another Armed Services Committee member.
Between the lines: People identifying as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Michael Waltz and Vice President Vance were among the 18 people in the Signal chat, per The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg.
The reporter from The Atlantic did a better job figuring out what information should be allowed for public consumption than the people in the intelligence and military leadership.
If Republicans wanted to jail Hillary Clinton for using the wrong email server, what should the punishment for this be?
When these statements are coming from Republicans, then we know something might have changed. But the comment from an R in that article was: "I've accidentally sent the wrong person a text. We all have."
This is not a "Whoopsie". They bypassed numerous protocols.
How many hearings did they have over Hillary’s emails?
This is 100x worse. They not only leaked the war plans. We have actual confirmation that they are using Signal to conduct these plans.
Not only is that a massive security risk, the fact that the messages delete violates the record laws.
Like, let me be clear, this is worse than Hillary Clinton's email server, because Clinton didn't have anything that was classified at such a high level on her server EXCEPTING in cases where it was classified at higher clearance AFTER the fact. Stuff you'd get out of FOIA.
The use of Signal here shows that they are almost certainly using it for just about EVERYTHING, with the EXPRESS PURPOSE of avoiding ANY FOIA requests.
They aren't "keeping" records, they're planning, executing, and refusing to record anything in direct violation of federal law, SPECIFICALLY for the EXPRESS PURPOSE of avoiding those records coming back on them because they're committing crimes.
They HANG people for this, and I'm not joking: this is willing and knowing negligence, purposeful avoidance of federal records laws. They've breached basically every PART of the espionage act.