Sen. Mark Warner & A Signal chat: You’d be fired - 03/26/25

0:00Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. The Signal chat heard around the world, debating who heard what military plans and what to do about it with Vice Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Mark Warner. If you were a military officer or a CIA case officer and you were so sloppy that you communicated on a non-secure channel and then you didn't even check who was on the line, your ass would be fired. The technology's security. Why are we using Signal? It was downloaded on everyone's app already when they got there. And what impact this will all have on the administration staffers involved, like National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.

0:46I think Waltz said it was embarrassing. You think? Plus, the rest of today's news that got us squawking, tariff Liberation Day approaches, Boeing on trial, and layoffs across the federal government. It is Wednesday, March 26th. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in three, two, one. Cue, please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square. I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan. Andrew is off today. In this maybe more confusion on exactly what type of tariffs we're talking about, President Trump giving some more mixed signals on what will be imposed next week in an interview on Newsmax.

1:35Yeah, the president said there wouldn't be very many exceptions to the tariffs he's been testing, teasing for April 2nd. But shortly after, he suggested some countries might not get hit quite as hard. I know some people say, oh, do you think it's too much? Well, they've been doing this to us for many years, whether it's China or India or Brazil or so many other places. And all we're going to do, it's reciprocal. We're just going to be reciprocal. In fact, I'll probably be more lenient than reciprocal, because if I was reciprocal, that would be that would be very tough for people. President said that he'll announce reciprocal tariffs on other nations next Wednesday, which he's been calling Liberation Day.

2:24President Trump said his administration is investigating the addition of a journalist to a signal text group of top officials discussing plans for military strikes in Yemen. But he backed National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and said that he did not believe the disclosures demanded a criminal investigation. Waltz said he spoke to Elon Musk yesterday and that he had the best technical minds looking at how this happened. During a Fox News interview, He struggled to explain how the Atlantic journalist was added to that group chat and said he didn't know him. Democratic Senator Mark Warner questioned National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard about that incident yesterday.

3:01She happened to be on the Hill for an Intelligence Committee hearing. Here's how that played out. If this was a rank and file intelligence officer who did this kind of careless behavior, what would you do with him? Senator, I'll reiterate that there was no classified material that was shared in that. And if there's no classified materials, share. And then if there's no classified materials, then you can't even answer the question whether you're on the chat. Yes. I still, the way Waltz answered all those questions I watched on Laura Ingraham last night, if it really was kind of like a whistleblower, someone with anti-Trump sentiments in the Trump, on the staff of Waltz or Hegseth or something like that, they would say that immediately.

3:46I would think. And they keep avoiding, oh, we're not sure how it happens. He wasn't in my contact list. I've never spoken to him. May have been a staff member. It doesn't seem like it would be a complicated investigation. No, it doesn't. But out of 7 billion people, how many people are on the planet? 7 billion? Out of all the phone numbers in all the world, the one that happened to be inadvertently put on the chat room was Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, whose titles are, you know, he called our soldiers losers and suckers. He is recruiting generals like Hitler. It's Hillary Clinton is actually battling Vladimir Putin.

4:27This guy is the biggest. I don't think Goldberg did anything intentionally wrong with this. I don't know. I don't know either. If he was expecting those emails. He didn't print the entire list of what was out there. I know. Look, this fell in the... For whatever reason. It's a big issue about why are we using Signal. People, it was downloaded on everyone's app already when they got there. Didn't you say the NSA said last week? The NSA said a month ago. Look, Whitcoff was in Russia and supposedly was one of the recipients of these. So that's just beyond the pale of probably irresponsible that he's over there because Russia probably saw everything that was, could have seen everything that was on.

5:04But the notion that, you know, Democrat approval is a 25 percent, you know, Bernie and AOC are traveling around trying to find a message. This drops into the lap of the Democrats so that they can totally control the news cycle with the incompetence of it. It's just too weird that it happened that it would be an easy investigation to figure out. OK, what does that what does that mean? I don't know. Well, it means that it was a setup that allowed the entire Trump administration to look very bad. And if you were going to give it to any journalist in the world, you'd give it to this Atlantic guy. I think Walt said it was embarrassing.

5:45You know, it's an embarrassment. Yeah. But you move on. But hopefully you can go back and figure out. Maybe nobody should be using Signal. It seems like an obvious. But the demagogue. I watched Himes from Connecticut. I watched somebody else. I thought Senator Warner wouldn't let anyone answer yesterday that he was talking. Politicians are going to politic. They are. And the right would have done it, too. They did it with Hillary and, you know, wiping of the laptop. But, you know, we know that Senator Warner loves Signal because he used it to talk to an oligarch back in 2018 to try to get dirt on the Steele dossier.

6:20Well, we're going to get the chance to talk to him. And to not leave a paper trail. So he's well versed in using Signal. A U.S. judge setting a summer trial now, trial date, in a government court case against Boeing stemming from those two deadly 737 MAX crashes back in 2018 and 2019. Boeing agreed last July to pay nearly$500 million and plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge. But a district judge rejected that deal and gave the company until April 11th to come to a new agreement on a plea deal. Yesterday, the judge set a June 23rd trial date, and that came after one day after we were reporting that Boeing was looking to withdraw from the existing plea deal, trying to not say the word guilty, and is hoping for more lenient treatment under the Trump administration.

7:13and the case you might recall stems from Boeing's alleged misrepresentation of a key system software on the 737 MAX. And before those two crashes years ago, they killed 346 people. I remember how, I don't know, it was discomforting what the pilots supposedly, they thought they were climbing, they were actually going down, and the software, there wasn't a redundant system or something, so they didn't know exactly what the plane was doing. Right, there were some changes that were put in, and the pilots weren't properly trained. Changes put in because the engines weren't as powerful to save fuel, but the plane was still, it was modified a little to have less power from the engines, but it required a software to fly correctly or something.

7:59And there was, if I remember correctly, this is going back years, but if I remember correctly, they didn't want to classify it as a complete change because then you would have to retrain all the pilots on it. Exactly, so they did it with software, And then they said that the pilots were totally trained with the software. But pilots were like trying to look through the manual. What's going on with this? Wait a minute. I think I'm climbing. Wait a minute. I stalled. It was just frightening and a large loss of life. The Treasury Department is expecting layoffs that one official has described as substantial.

8:34That language is from a legal filing in which a department HR official also said that workforce cuts would disproportionately affect probationary employees who've been ordered temporarily reinstated to their jobs after the Trump administration tried to fire them. All these things are working through the courts. This doesn't seem like this isn't that earth shattering in terms of what. Of course, that's probably what's going to happen if the court rules in the administration's favor. Probationary employees are government workers who have been in their roles less than about one or two years. The court filing from yesterday said that the Treasury Department finalizing plans in response to President Trump's executive order last month on streamlining government operations by the Department of Government Efficiency.

9:23You know, I was thinking about this morning. We had someone who mentioned yesterday they thought Amazon is now the largest private hire. I thought it was Walmart still, but they're probably very close. Both of them are close seconds behind the federal government. And I was wondering with these doge cuts, if you actually see the government not be the largest employer. That would be the first time that I ever remember that in my lifetime. I'd be worried. If you were working at the government. Only because Elon came into Twitter and it's the same. It's better than it probably ever has been with how many less employees?

10:00Wasn't it 25 % that they? No, I thought they got rid of it at least half. Maybe it was 50%. At least half and didn't even miss it. I say again and again and again, what do you expect? And it's the age old Republicans versus just the whole way of viewing the world. But we totally accept in the private sector if a company's what it's bringing in doesn't match what it's spending. You need to downsize the company. It's just it's not going to be an ongoing concern if you don't do that. And we get used to it that we see, you know, announcing eight thousand layoffs, five thousand layoffs, four thousand layoffs.

10:35You've got to get those two. The government has never had to do that because all it does when it overspends, It either borrows money, it taxes our citizens, or they find a way. There's no one saying, stop, you can't do this. You just ask for more money, more subsidies, more taxes. And after doing this for how long, do you expect that it's totally bloated, oversized, inefficient? There's fraud happening. I mean, it has to be done. Maybe you want to do it with Congress. There's an article in the Journal today that says, look. Maybe you have to do it with Congress. You're right. Right. If we had a legitimate government to look at itself, we wouldn't have to do this.

11:18If Congress would actually look and do things necessary to do. There have been times where they've done this in math. But they're all addicted to pork. Everyone in Congress is addicted to pork. They are, but remember, under Clinton, they closed several of the military bases, which was, nobody thought they could ever do that because military bases are the one thing that everybody wants to support. Right. And trying to get that through. But we've had Simpson Bowles where we tried to get at that. They did not require that Simpson-Bowles be something that was followed up afterwards. But if there's billions of dollars going into a program, and you saw Stacey Abrams or whatever you want to look at, anything in the area, billions of dollars leaves so much room for people to get rich.

11:56For water on the edges. For people to get rich. And they do. Yeah. And there's just no doubt in my mind. So I don't know why I'm seeing these crazy people planning. I think it's a day of did you see this weekend? It's a day of global something or other against Tesla and against Elon. They're going to be demonstrations. Of course, they won't turn violent. They're saying it's not going to be violent, but all about what's it? They're saying he's unelected. Who besides Trump is elected? Congress, obviously, but who in the administration? Who in the administration? The question comes back to presidents bring in people that they want to do things.

12:34The question comes back to that Congress has the power of the first strings. So that's going to go through. But you can certainly get advice from a lot of different people that aren't elected. I don't know. And they always have. It's just that Elon Musk has more access and control than typically would be there in the past. Cheese will be next. Coming up next on Squawk Pod, what does sloppy comms on Signal mean for national security? Vice Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, Democratic Senator Mark Warner. Just the notion that you've got a vice president disagreeing with a national security advisor about an imminent strike in Ukraine, that knowledge alone our adversaries would give an arm and a leg for.

13:19And who takes the fall? Secretary Hexf should step down for the good of the administration.

13:31Welcome back to Squawk Pod from CNBC. Signalgate has turned into the story of the week, just how the editor of The Atlantic was added into a potentially top secret group chat with highly ranking members of the Trump administration. There was no classified information, as I understand it. They used an app, if you want to call it an app, that a lot of people use, a lot of people in government use, a lot of people in the media use. And I think I'll ask Mike. Mike is here. Do you want to respond to that? The National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who it appears created the group on the encrypted messaging app Signal, made his first public comments yesterday in a meeting at the White House.

14:15Yes, Mr. President, you asked about lessons. I think there's a lot of the lessons. There's a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves, making up lies about this president, whether it's the Russia hoax or making up lies about Gold Star families. And this one in particular, I've never met, don't know, never communicated with. And we are and we are looking into him reviewing how the heck he got into this room. Never met, don't know, never communicated with.

14:48In an example of stunningly accidental timing, two of the reported members of that group, CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Senator, I was on a signal messaging group. So you were the John Ratcliffe on that chat? I was. Thank you. And Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were witnesses at a scheduled hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Director Cabard, did you participate in the group chat with Secretary of Defense and other Trump senior officials discussing the Yemen war plans? Senator, I don't want to get into the specifics of the deal. Ma 'am, were you on? You're not going to be willing to address it.

15:24So you're not, are you denying? Will you answer my question, ma 'am? You were not TG on this group chat? I'm not going to get into the specifics of the delivery. So you refused to acknowledge whether you were on this group chat? That was Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner of Virginia grilling the National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe over the group text chat on Signal with Trump administration's officials that included a journalist discussing military strikes on Yemen. The senator is calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Walds.

15:59Senator Warner joins us this morning. And, Senator, what have you learned since yesterday? Well, I've learned that so far, we're getting stonewalled by both Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and to a lesser degree, John Radcliffe, the CIA director. These guys can't have it both ways. If this call was to use Trump's words, you know, totally perfect, and there was nothing inappropriate about it, put out the tape, put out the line. But I think that's so patently false. Let me give you two examples. One, just the notion that you got a vice president disagreeing with a national security adviser about an imminent strike in Ukraine.

16:44That knowledge alone, our adversaries would give an arm and a leg for in terms of human intelligence. But if it includes what I believe it will show, detailed military strike plans that if they could have gotten to the enemy, could have fallen in harm's way. and frankly redirected the Yemeni Houthi forces so that they could have actually taken down American assets. That's inexcusable. As I said, if you were a military officer or a CIA case officer and you were so sloppy that you communicated on a non-secure channel and then you didn't even check who was on the line, your ass would be fired. And this is not a first time from this administration.

17:32Remember, two weeks in, they revealed 200 CIA agents and went, oops, well, those folks, they can't be deployed in the field anymore. And there's not a day that goes by that Elon Musk and his Doge boys don't either stupidly or carelessly release a piece of classified information or private information about Americans. At some point, this level of incompetence, somebody has to be responsible. You you said yesterday that you had asked yesterday you asked the FBI director if there was any investigation into this. He said he didn't have an update that he just learned about it. But you did ask for an update by the end of business yesterday.

18:11What have you heard back? I didn't hear anything back today. But these same guys will be testifying before the House Intelligence Committee. I hope that they will ask Director Patel. I mean, again, if I didn't think my head could explode with this crowd anymore. But the rank hypocrisy, whether it was Gabbard, the DNI director, you know, 11 or 12 days ago saying if there's any leakers, we're going to pursue them to the end of the law. Patel says the same stuff. And until their incompetence, their sloppiness, their, you know, putting Americans potentially in harm's way and violating basic security 101, when they do it, it'll be interesting to see whether they find excuses or they actually launch a legitimate investigation.

19:02Senator, I think the NSA warned about Signal like a month ago not to use it for things like this, although it was on a lot of people's phones when they got there. Then it's also pointed out that Steve Witkoff was over in Moscow, and he apparently was on the chat, which probably means that the Russians knew exactly what was going on. It's not that secure. All that would have problems. Lesson number one. We have problems with all those things. But here's here's I just have to ask you this. And it's kind of an aside. So, you know, you're you've got to bounce in your step today. A lot of Democrats, I saw them yesterday, bounce in their step.

19:45This comes after sort of a couple of weeks in the wilderness looking for a message. Is it at all strange to you that this landed in your lap and Democrats laps the way it did? Isn't it weird that out of 7 billion people on the planet, the one person that mistakenly was added to this chat was probably the biggest anti-Trump journalist that you could find. His entire media organization is destined to try to make the Trump administration fail and to try to get, you know, he's been doing it for eight years. How does that happen accidentally? Do you think someone in the White House is disloyal or on the staff of Waltz orchestrated this intentionally?

20:33Wouldn't you want to know? You're not going to ask any questions. You're like, thank you, sir. We love this, but we don't know how it happened. That's how, Joe, you're 100 % right, man. And it might been the the, you know, the aliens that I think, Miss Gabbard, one of these people said before we're interfering in elections. Maybe they mysteriously pressed Jess Goldberg secretly into this channel. If you believe that, well, there's a whole lot of folks online that you could know you're going to commune with. I think somebody screwed up. I agree. I agree. I agree. People didn't say they screwed up.

21:14People didn't say, gosh, we screwed up. That was the hypocrisy of what was yesterday. Look, no problem here. Nothing official. I almost heard, I almost expected one of them to say, well, this was a perfectly beautiful call, the same way Trump's beautiful call with Zelensky. Did you demand Lloyd Austin's resignation when he was out of pocket for two weeks and didn't tell anyone in the White House until four days afterwards that he was not in charge of Secretary of Defense? I called that out as inappropriate behavior. I called out the first folks. This will probably blow over, Senator. Well, I know you hope that, but the thing that I would just say, Joe, Joe, we've got this, if this was a one-off, if this was, oh my gosh, we're rookies, We didn't understand how you add people to a chat line.

22:12But this is a history and tradition or a pattern of sloppiness. Two weeks in, this is before Radcliffe got to the CIA, they released inadvertently 200 names of CIA officers. So their identities were discovered. It cost$200 ,000 to put a CIA agent through security clearance and training. That's sloppiness. Or how many days have you guys reported on Musk getting into, you know, whether it is somebody's personal files or this information or that? And again, there's just no focus on Security 101. Senator, I guess the bigger lesson coming out of this is the idea that these conversations were taking place on Signal.

23:03Again, the government has come out since and said this shouldn't be happening. What will happen in the future in terms of making sure that you can have these conversations in a safe way? We know from administration to administration, people say it's onerous. You can't get it all in the same place. How do we fix this? How do we make sure that we do have? Good. Go ahead. Well, what happens is, listen, signal is better than being on cell phones because it is encrypted end to end. But the agency and others are very clear that says, you know, you want to use that to call your wife or some casual, nothing classified.

23:44But if it's classified, there are a whole set of you get into what's called a SCIF, a secure area. There are classified communication tools. And here's the crazy thing. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard was, I believe when she was using this, was in Southeast Asia. If she's on a government plane, it might be a pain. Go back to the plane. But that's why you have your secure communications. And Mr. Whitcoff, I don't know the guy. But anybody that is that takes any device to Moscow with the efforts the Russians have to penetrate you, they don't have to have physical control of your device to drop in malware.

24:24there. You know, that's a violation of security one on one. But I believe sometimes, Joe, these guys feel like the rules don't apply to them. And this is going to come back and bite us. This does not make America more secure. This gives valuable information to the bad guys. You live and you learn. You know, all all over Twitter, everyone wants me to yell at you about using Signal back in 2018 to talk to that oligarch to try to get some some dirt from from the Steele dossier and they you don't use it anymore but you did back then some people think that the president's comments were the probably the best response that he made there was a mistake made he's a good guy hopefully he learns from it do you think in the end let me just let me just ask joe can i ask you yeah well we'll see we'll see what happens when they say there's nothing there And if the text comes out and there is packaging and target information from the DOD delivered on this channel, that's one of the reasons why I think Secretary Hayshef should step down for the good of the administration.

25:31And again, I just I think there is a little richness of what you said in the fact that if you go back way back in the old days as well. And oh, my gosh, Hillary Clinton was using the wrong emailer. Joe Biden's incompetent. Come on, guys. You know, if if you don't think this is a case of incompetence and a pattern after a variety of other kind of sloppy use of classified information, then you've not been following the last 60 plus days that I've been following. But in terms of going after terrorists and in terms of what we've seen accomplished, I mean, even this was a success in what happened. And I thought some of what we know about the text was fairly thoughtful.

26:14You remember the Biden administration started with the biggest effort in history with Afghanistan and 13 dead Americans. Let's not get too sanctimonious and high and mighty about screwing up, Senator. Should we go back even to the Hillary Clinton? That's only four years, Senator. I'm surprised, Joe. You're not gonna throw in the Hillary servers. Joe, Joe, let's go ahead, man. She liked that clean with a cloth, remember? Acknowledge, acknowledge this was a screw up. I do. If the Houthis, the bombing was a success, God bless. Thank God the person on the line wasn't an Iranian spy, and they could have given that to the Hooties and that bombing success might have turned into something that cost American lives.

27:06At least acknowledge that's what at stake. And if that kind of mistake is made, and I go back to what I said in the earlier teaser, if this was a military officer or a CIA case officer, their butts would be fired. Okay. Senator Warner, thank you for joining us and we hope you'll follow up. I know John Thune, the Republican majority leader in the Senate, has said that there are very likely to be investigations that come into this as well. We've got to find out where it came from first. And, Senator, we got the youngest headshot of you, and you don't say thank you or anything. You look like you're about 30 when we show you.

27:44And you didn't say thanks or anything. I mean, I'm always appreciative because you're always so agreeable with everything I say. Thank you, sir. I'm smiling, right? Thank you, Senator. We'll be right back.