On Friday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) responded to a question on whether he called for then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to resign over not notifying people about his health absence by stating that “The fact that the secretary of defense was getting health care is fundamentally different from the secretary of defense sharing, on an unsecured platform, attack plans.”
Co-host Joe Kernen asked, “You know what did have an adverse consequence…was Afghanistan? Did you call for Lloyd Austin’s resignation? Not only did we lose 13 servicemembers, we left $70 billion worth of equipment that fell into the hands of the Taliban. A couple of years later, he was out of pocket for two weeks and didn’t tell the White House. Did you ask for him to resign at this point? Are you actually asking for Hegseth and Waltz to resign when you didn’t ask for Lloyd Austin?”
Coons responded, “There is nothing that Lloyd Austin did by getting healthcare treatment that put our national security at risk.”
Coons added, “The fact that the secretary of defense was getting health care is fundamentally different from the secretary of defense sharing, on an unsecured platform, attack plans. … I am saying that he demonstrably violated a directive that was just shared in the Pentagon about don’t use Signal for classified information. It is not reliably secure.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
Read the full article here