BURSTRep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) slammed the Trump administration over its response to the fallout from high-level officials' use of the Signal app to discuss military plans, saying the White House has "done nothing" to prevent a repeat mistake.
“They've done nothing to show the American public and most importantly, our troops and intelligence professionals who risk their lives every day,” Moulton, a Marine veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee, said Monday in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“They've done nothing to show that this will not happen again. This is a gross violation of the law.”
His comments come after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters otherwise, saying steps have been taken to ensure "something like that can obviously never happen again moving forward," without elaborating.
The administration is no longer looking into why national security leaders used an outside app to relay sensitive details about a then-impending military strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen last month and how a journalist was inadvertently given access to their chat.
“This case has been closed here at the White House, as far as we are concerned,” Leavitt said.
None of the officials involved have faced public disciplinary action, and President Trump has indicated no one will lose their jobs over it.
The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported Sunday that national security adviser Mike Waltz used the app for other high-level discussions about military operations, but it's unclear whether those chats included classified information.
"This puts American lives at risk. The troops are in danger because of this behavior,” Moulton said. “It absolutely has to stop."
The Massachusetts Democrat also noted that Congress could launch its own probe, but he doubts GOP leaders will move forward with one because of possible backlash from Trump and his supporters.
"It's certainly possible, if our Republican colleagues weren't total cowards and so afraid to confront this administration," he said.
Moulton said he thinks Signal — which facilitates encrypted text messages, phone calls and video calls — can be useful when chats are about information that is open. He also acknowledged he has used it for government discussions.
"But anything about future operations, future decisions, that's classified — and there's good reason that's classified," he said. "When you put it on an unclassified phone in an unclassified space, on an app that is not cleared for classified information because it may have holes that allow our enemy to compromise it ... there's a lot of ways in which this is very, very wrong and incredibly dangerous."