A Completely Unserious Pentagon | Shield of the Republic

Eliot and Eric welcome Eliot's former Harvard student, Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut's 4th Congressional District and Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. They discuss the latest news about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's Signal chats that included his wife, brother and personal attorney and which featured operational details of impending attacks on Houthi terrorists in Yemen. They discuss the firing of General Timothy Haugh (and his civilian deputy Wendy Noble) who headed the National Security Agency and Cybercom, noting both the importance and sensitivity of NSA's role collecting communications intelligence and the implications of that collection for the 1st Amendment and the privacy of American citizens. They talk about the dismantling of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the elements at the State Department that were established to combat Russian and Chinese disinformation as well as the Executive Order instructing the Justice Department to investigate former CISA Director Chris Krebs for his refusal in 2020 to assert that the election that year had been "rigged" and "stolen." They also discuss the importance of objective information being conveyed to the President by intelligence professionals, the potential damage to intelligence sharing with allies, the views of Representative Himes's Republican colleagues behind closed doors, and much more.

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

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