The View’s Whoopi Goldberg ridiculed the Trump administration on Thursday over the continued fallout from Signalgate, likening the White House’s attempts to brush off the chat group leak scandal to a cat “covering up” its “poop” in the litter box.
After The Atlantic published the full messages from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth detailing highly sensitive attack plans in an unsecured chat group that inadvertently included Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Hegseth and the administration have responded by personally attacking Goldberg while insisting that nothing classified was shared.
“If this story proves anything, it proves that Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt fumed at Wednesday’s press briefing.
Hegseth, a former Fox News morning host, reacted by ridiculing Goldberg while claiming that “they know it’s not war plans” because he didn’t include a “flight path” or “sources and methods,” adding that there was “no classified information.” Hegseth’s former colleague Jennifer Griffin, however, spoke to current and former defense officials who said that the details Hegseth laid out in the chat were “FAR MORE sensitive” than typical “war plans.”
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, shifted the blame while speaking to reporters on Wednesday while simultaneously raging about the “witch hunt” over the stunning security breach. “Well, that’s what I heard,” Trump said when asked if he still believed that nothing classified was shared. “I don’t know. I’m not sure. How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do [with it].”
After airing a montage of the administration desperately trying to spin the brewing controversy, Goldberg reacted by comparing their actions to a feline taking care of business.
“Welcome to poop in the cat box,” she snarked, with her comments partially bleeped by the show’s control room. “Where they are just covering up as quick as they can!”
The Oscar-winning actress — who also pantomimed a cat shuffling in the litter box — first introduced the phrase during Wednesday’s broadcast of the ABC talk show, stating that it would be a recurring bit to describe the White House’s attempts to downplay and deflect the group chat leak.
“I’m going to start calling this ‘in the cat box,’ because that’s what they’re doing,” she asserted on Wednesday. “They’re doing what cats do. When the cat uses the cat box, the cat [shuffles] like this and tries to cover it up, you know? Covers it all up.”
During Thursday’s show, co-host Joy Behar quipped that the president’s claim of ignorance regarding the chat group and whether the attack plans should have been classified reminded her of a classic ‘60s sitcom character.
“Yeah, you ever see Hogan’s Heroes where the guy is like, ‘I know nothing.’ That is Trump,” she exclaimed.
The hosts went on to question why Republican lawmakers aren’t calling for the president to fire any of the officials involved in the snafu, especially considering that “they love to fire people, as Goldberg noted. (The majority of GOP voters, on the other hand, find Signalgate to be problematic, and Republicans on Capitol Hill are growing increasingly restless over the scandal.)
“They think we’re stupid is my opinion on this,” Behar declared. “They really think we’re stupid. They’re saying this is not classified information.”
Alyssa Farah Griffin, the panel’s resident conservative and a former Trump administration official, added that Hegseth wasn’t even doing the “bare minimum of his job” while taking issue with the way he was dodging responsibility over the group chat.
“I am losing my mind over the fact that they’re treating it like Jeffrey Goldberg was the problem, and the most scandalous part was a journalist was added,” she said. “It was that you were using a nonconfidential open source technology on your personal cellphone to share what any military expert not named Pete Hegseth would say is classified.”
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