‘This Looks Pretty Bad’: Brit Hume Nails Trump Administration For Scandal ‘Mess’
Longtime Fox News analyst Brit Hume said President Donald Trump and the rest of his administration are “making a mess” with their botched response to the scandal in which a journalist was accidentally given access to a group chat with highly sensitive military information.
“All that has done is prolong the story,” he wrote on X.
National security adviser Michael Waltz reportedly added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg by accident to a group chat discussion of plans for military action in Yemen and other extremely sensitive matters.
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The chat also included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, among others.
Goldberg described the details in the group chat as “war plans,” but Hegseth and others have tried to argue semantics, saying those details don’t count as “war plans.”
Hume said they’re missing the point.
He wrote that there are two “iron rules” for how to handle a scandal like this. First, get the facts out and take responsibility. And second, don’t feed the story.
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“The administration is making a mess of rule two by getting bogged down in a dispute over whether the details of Yemen bombing raids were a war plan and whether those details were, or should have been, classified,” he wrote.
Hegseth and others in the administration have also responded by attacking Goldberg.
Hume said that’s another mistake.
“Look, I’m not a particular fan of Goldberg or of his magazine,” Hume said in an interview Wednesday with Fox News host Bret Baier. “But he didn’t do anything wrong here.”
Hume said Goldberg was added to the chat “passively” and left out many of the details in his initial report.
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“So, then they attacked him, and said that he wasn’t telling the truth about it, which just gave him a reason to release the details as he did this morning,” he said, referring to a more detailed report The Atlantic released on Wednesday in response to the Trump administration’s attacks on Goldberg and the magazine.
Despite that, Hume said he didn’t think anyone in the administration would lose their job over the scandal.
“The fact of the matter is, that although this looks pretty bad, and it should never have happened, and the information probably should’ve been classified, and all the rest of it, the fact is, it did not fall into hostile foreign hands, the mission went off successfully, so it did not turn out to be harmful in any meaningful way,” he said. “It just looks bad.”
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See more of his discussion with Baier below:
