MSNBC host Michael Steele put Attorney General Pam Bondi on blast on Saturday for her flippant approach to information security.
“Is she being deliberately ignorant for the sake of playing down this whole thing?” Steele, a former head of the Republican National Committee, said on The Weekend.
His comments came in response to a clip of Bondi speaking with Fox News in which she defended the top Trump officials’ use of messaging app Signal.
On Monday, The Atlantic published a bombshell report revealing that Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally added to a Signal chat in which top Trump administration officials—including Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, and Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard—discussed details of planned air attacks against Houthi rebel forces in Yemen.
“I don’t think foreign adversaries are able to hack Signal, as far as I know,” Bondi said on Fox News.
Steele was not impressed.
“As the Attorney General of the United States, I’d think she would understand that in fact our foreign adversaries absolutely know how to dip into it,” he raged.
The former RNC chair went on to say that former CIA Director John Brennan had, during a recent segment on the show, explained that encrypted messaging apps only protect messages in transit, meaning they can still be accessed upon receipt if the recipient’s device has been compromised.
“Come on people, stop playing us for stupid,” Steele added.
Steele’s guest, Democrat Sen. Chris Coons, agreed.
“Exactly,” the senator said. “Signal and WhatsApp are more secure than just open texting, but they are far from secure enough to handle classified, national security information.”
Coons stressed that Signal was no place to discuss sensitive details about attack plans.
“You can’t just throw it around on whatever app you think is going to be secure today,” Coons added.
