Sen. Maggie Hassan speaks during an event in Tilton on Friday, March 28, 2025. (Photo by William Skipworth)
U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan, while visiting Tilton on Friday, railed against President Donald Trump’s national security team for the controversial leak of military plans to a journalist, stood behind her vote to confirm the president’s pick for Food and Drug Administration commissioner, and discussed her efforts to get more information about the Nashua German-American detained by immigration officials.
In late March, The Atlantic published a story revealing that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, the news magazine’s editor in chief, to a group chat on the messaging app Signal. That group chat also included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and over a dozen other high-level military and administration officials. In the chat, the officials discussed extremely sensitive details about a series of military airstrikes in Yemen. The leak was immediately lambasted by critics who said the officials were being careless with confidential information and skirting record-keeping laws.
“The Signalgate scandal — and it is a scandal — reflects how reckless and careless this administration is,” Hassan said. “They put our servicemen and women at risk by casually discussing war plans, literally the timing of air strikes on a Signal chain. It’s unacceptable, and as I have said before, it’s one thing to misidentify somebody in a Signal chat when you’re making dinner plans. It’s another thing to do it when you’re planning an airstrike.”
Hassan was one of 20 Democrats who voted to confirm Ratcliffe in January; 24 Democrats voted against him. (One independent, Sen. Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats, voted for him, and another, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who also caucuses with Democrats, voted against him. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania did not vote.)
Hassan wouldn’t say whether the Signal scandal was giving her pause about her vote.
Additionally, Hassan was one of three Democrats (Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire’s other U.S. senator, was another) who voted to confirm Martin Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon and outspoken health care commentator, to his role as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
“Dr. Makary has a very strong record of fighting the opioid epidemic and of holding FDA and past FDA administrators and commissioners to account for their role in fueling the opioid epidemic,” Hassan said. “And I think it was very important to have somebody at the FDA who will continue to work to fight the opioid epidemic as strongly and effectively as he can.”
However, Makary has received criticism from some of Hassan’s fellow Democrats who, in questioning leading up to the vote, couldn’t get the doctor to rule out tightening restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone and were alarmed by his tepid responses on vaccines — which he said he supported but he wanted the FDA to reevaluate how it gathers input from vaccine experts.
Makary previously garnered attention during the COVID-19 pandemic as an outspoken opponent of vaccine mandates, though he supported voluntary vaccinations and other public health measures like shutdowns early in the pandemic and masking. He was also the author of a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed that incorrectly predicted the virus would “be mostly gone by April.”
Hassan also discussed the detainment of the German national Fabian Schmidt, who holds a green card and lives in Nashua.
Schmidt was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (a division within the Department of Homeland Security) officials at Boston’s Logan Airport in early March and taken to a detention center in Rhode Island. It is unclear why Schmidt, a 34-year-old man whose parents say he’s lived in the U.S. since he was a teenager, is being detained, but he has a court date set in June.
“We are in contact with the Department of Homeland Security about that,” she said, adding that her and Shaheen’s teams are collaborating. “We have made it clear that DHS needs to follow the law, and we are waiting to get more information from legal representatives of the detainee, but it is very concerning.”
Hassan said she did not know the justification for Schmidt’s detainment.
Read the full article here