Tommy Vietor

Yes, exactly.

So yeah, it just criminalized it.

It just tries to penalize basic news gathering.

And I think this is a long-term mistake because there is this anti-war kind of isolationist part of the MAGA movement.

They don't want America in foreign wars.

They don't want us to nation build.

They don't want the Pentagon to waste money.

They don't want service members getting killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, right?

Far away places.

And my arguments to all those people would be like, okay, so you want a strong Pentagon press corps.

Like you, this building is spending a trillion dollars a year.

They need more oversight.

They need more scrutiny.

or else we're gonna see more waste, fraud, and abuse.

And then like, I personally, like when I was on the NSC press team, like I had a lot of arguments with reporters about publishing classified stuff.

That ranged from like sitting down with the New York Times and learning that they had

a quarter of a million State Department cables from WikiLeaks and just being like, okay, like, guess we're fucked.

Or like one-off conversations where, you know, you're like, can you please be less specific about how we got that information and just say like reliable intelligence instead of like intercepted communications or something like that.

But when I look back on that, I really think the balance between

of concern was overly tilted towards national security over and over and over again.