FIGHTING WORDS

Sacked Susan Rice Hits Back at ‘Dumb as a Rock’ Pete Hegseth

Rice was fired from the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board on Thursday.

Former U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice had some choice words for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth following her ouster from the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.

Her sacking was announced late Thursday evening, the Defense Department issuing a statement that read, “changes are needed to support the new strategic direction and policy priorities of the department and to ensure departmental resources are used efficiently.” However, the dismissal came after a top Pentagon official accused several advisory committee members of being responsible for the endless stream of leaks from the department in recent weeks.

In an interview with No Lie With BTC host Brian Tyler Cohen, Rice, who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, was asked what would have happened if something like Signalgate had happened during the Obama administration. Rice responded, “The Secretary of Defense would have been fired in a heartbeat” after news of the initial Signalgate broke, “along with many of the others” involved in the scandal.

Rice described Hegseth’s leaks, including this week’s news that the Defense Secretary used an unsecured internet connection to run Signal on a personal computer in his office, as a “huge breach of national security” that puts “our men and women in uniform at risk.”

She also said of the fiasco that Hegseth, as a “white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man,” proves that it’s possible that someone “can be as dumb as a rock and be deemed qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense.”

Taking an opportunity to call out the president, Rice argued that the “rules apparently don’t apply to Trump and to his people, they only apply to his adversaries,” which is proof that Trump is governing “as if he were a monarch and everybody is subservient to him, and anybody who criticizes or questions the actions or behavior of his team or himself are inherently the enemies.”

Despite the Trump administration throwing its support behind Hegseth, Rice told Cohen, “The reality is Hegseth compromised national security repeatedly, he is utterly irresponsible and reckless, he never should have been in that job in the first place, he was completely unqualified, and it’s past time that he go.”

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Catherine BourisReporter

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