I've had Sasha on before. People loved her. Thrill to have her back. A lot has happened since

Sasha was last on. One of the things, of course, is the Signal chat where the top security

officials in the country were using Signal to communicate about attack plans in advance. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about all of it and

more. But welcome, Sasha Engber. Welcome back. Hey, good to see you. And I just want to make clear that

I'm not in my bedroom. I am in a hotel room in Michigan.

And it's good to be with you to talk about Signalgate.

Signalgate, indeed.

So I have to say there is a story about Congressman Himes asking questions of Director Tulsi Gabbard at a congressional hearing.

And there are stories that extend out the hearing transcript, making up a dialogue between the two to make it worse for Tulsi Gabbard,

and it was already bad enough for my estimation.

When the Director of National Intelligence is asked a question by a congressman, and

congressman says, hey, you retweeted a contributor to Russia today,

Russian state TV, and the U.S. Director of National Intelligence basically responds like a 12-year-old and says, no, that's from my private

email, and I'm just using my First Amendment rights, right? I have my, those are my own views.

And so it's astonishing to watch that, but all of these questions are in the context of the senior officials of the government

communicating with each other on Signal, which is a confidential commercial app in the U.S. government, the Signal Corps of the U.S. Army

communicates on the behalf of all of the senior officials and makes the arrangements that they are on impenetrable, classified

networks. None of that was used. So at any rate, I'm reading this story about the testimony

with Gabbard and Himes. I'm like, look, again, right, fake story.

And that was my exact reaction when I read the Signalgate story. I thought that someone

has concocted a Jeffrey Goldberg Atlantic story, and it has come into my orbit, so to speak, through my kind of information pipeline, how I consume news, and it's good, right?

It's like it's not, but there's no way it can be real.

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