Judge Susan Crawford
speaker
75 appearances
12 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Judge Susan Crawford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Every single national security cabinet-level principal, whether you're the national security advisor or the secretary of defense or the director of national intelligence or the secretary of state, they travel everywhere they go with a secure communications package. These are people who set up for them secure phones, secure videos, secure document handling capacity. So that's always with us.
a cabinet-level principle if they're traveling. The fact that they wouldn't use it if they had it is mind-boggling. Secondly, in everybody's home in the Washington area, there are secure compartmented facilities in their homes where they can go and communicate by phone, by email, by video securely. So we do that for a reason.
We do not communicate national security information or have principals committee meetings by signal text chat. It's not a secure vehicle. You're not allowed to put them on your government phones. It's not for classified information. And since these were all done on people's personal phones, highly vulnerable to infiltration and exfiltration by our adversaries.
So just the mere fact of having a principles committee meeting by text on a signal chain is incredibly reckless and dangerous. Then you share information. Classified discussions about military plans and operations and then classified military documents about those plans and operations on this chat. It's extraordinarily reckless, dangerous, and in my recollection, unprecedented.
Unless, no, there's no, yes, the Russians have whatever Witkoff was doing or saying on his personal cell phone. The way Witkoff should have handled this and the way this meeting should have been conducted is Witkoff should have gone into the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and gone into their secure compartment facility and conducted his participation by videoconference.
That's how this whole thing should have happened. There should never have been a signal chat used as the vehicle for a discussion that involved anything sensitive regarding national security. The Russians undoubtedly have it.
In the normal course, this would be the subject of a gazillion congressional investigations that took months, if not years, and went through every aspect of this with a fine-tooth comb on a bipartisan basis. That's how it would normally happen. And people would be held accountable. In a normal administration, if the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of Defense
the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director engaged in a sensitive conversation about military operations on a non-secure platform, they would no longer be in those jobs. That's just how it works. We can't afford to have such recklessness and irresponsibility among the people who are meant to guard our national security.
I'm not a lawyer, and so I'm not going to make that judgment. But those that are lawyers and who have spoken on this have said this could well be a violation of the Espionage Act or a series of violations. It seems much more clearly to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act unless the people on that chat very deliberately then copied and downloaded the chat to a government agency
communication system, a classified or unclassified system, then they will have violated the Presidential Records Act. On that, I have enormous experience and I'm pretty confident in saying that. But for Donald Trump to say, well, Mike Walz has learned his lesson and won't do it again is ridiculous. More than insufficient.
The president who campaigned in 2016 on Hillary's emails knows very well how important it is to safeguard classified information. And if he can't hold his team accountable for this, then clearly he's not interested in safeguarding classified information.
Well, let me give you my overall thoughts, but let me give you, before I do that, a specific thought that relates to what we've been talking about, this so-called signal gate that is relevant to your question. J.D. Vance is revealed on that signal chat to have expressed a really shocking view that is consistent with the concern inherent in your question.
His view was that, in his judgment, it wasn't worth Now, the United States taking military action against an Iranian backed terrorist organization that was attacking and continues to attack the United States, our personnel and our vessels, because it would have the ancillary benefit of helping the Europeans who.
use that passageway around Yemen, that sea passageway, Red Sea, etc., for much of their commerce. He would rather screw the Europeans and leave the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who are terrorists to continue to attack us than do something that would be beneficial to our European allies. So we're living in a real upside-down time. Now, to go to your larger question,
There is a extraordinary pattern here in the Trump administration of the United States taking actions and decisions that directly harm our closest allies, whether the Europeans or the Canadians.
You know, threatening Greenland, threatening Canada, as you said, imposing painful tariffs on our closest partners, withdrawing USAID from the field, closing down the Voice of America, leaving Ukraine almost to Russia's mercy. This is all of a piece that is extremely important. We have realigned ourselves, reoriented ourselves.
We are no longer the ally and trusted friend of Western democratic nations. We are instead the favored partner now of Russia and through Russia, China, who are closely aligned. This is upside down and it's deeply disturbing. We are rupturing trust and ties that have kept Americans safe.
since World War II, and we are casting our lot with autocrats like Putin and Xi, who don't share our values, don't share our interests, but want to take the United States off the field in Europe, in Asia, and elsewhere around the world. It's absolutely upside down, and you have got to ask yourself, what is the motive for
President Trump and his team to pursue this radical revision of what has kept us, the structures and the relationships, the alliances that have kept us safe for so long.
Thanks, Ben. I look forward to it. Take care.
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