Hegseth was the only cabinet member with Trump while Rubio, Bessent were on decoy plane

[0:00] Joining us, MSNOW senior national security reporter David Rohde, New York Times chief White House correspondent and MSNOW contributor Peter Baker, [0:08] former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe and MSNOW military analyst, retired lieutenant general Mark Hurtling, [0:15] and former director of legislative affairs for President Trump during his first administration. [0:20] Mark Short, everybody welcome. David, let's talk about the threat. How serious? [0:24] I think it's serious. Look, our colleague Mark Santee has also been digging into this and talking to the Secret Service. [0:30] Since the war started with Iran, there have been increased threats specifically against the president from Iran. [0:36] And then even before that, the deep dive that occurred after the Butler assassination attempt, and that assassination, again, had no ties to Iran. [0:44] It was the lone gunman who was shot dead by the Secret Service that day. [0:47] They found even more evidence as they dug into that case, just peripherally, two threats from Iran towards the president. [0:53] And it was great that you mentioned that what the signs that were up in the protests and the death to Trump. [0:58] I mean, if you'll remember, and it was originally a fatwa from Iran against Salman Rushdie, the author. [1:04] He was attacked. [1:05] And they almost killed him. [1:06] They almost killed him a couple of summers ago and up in upstate New York when he was giving a speech. [1:10] And that was just a young guy who was living in New Jersey who tried to stab him to death. [1:14] So I think the threat was real. [1:17] And I trust the Secret Service that they saw this as a credible threat. [1:20] But the president's own actions in terms of what he said to the press and, you know, who he took with him and who he didn't, you know, I think it's fair game to question those. [1:28] But I do think this was a serious threat. [1:30] How extraordinary, Mark, to have the Secret Service and U.S. intelligence collect information that Air Force One might be targeted by a surface-to-air missile, a missile launcher on a shoulder, and then to see somebody, apparently, according to the reporting from The Times, with a shoulder missile launcher within the vicinity of NATO. [1:52] Yeah, I'll take that. [1:56] I didn't know if you met me or Mark Short, but what I'd say is it's not uncommon, Katie. [2:02] There are constant threats to key targets, principles, as the Secret Service calls them. [2:07] What you'll talk about, though, is when various elements of a threat come together in a straight line. [2:16] You know, you mentioned, too, that they knew what hotel he was in and what plane he's going to be flying out at, obviously. [2:24] There were probably many, many more that caused the Secret Service to conduct this kind of deception mission to deploy a different airplane, get him off of the airplane, not let anybody know about it. [2:38] But it's common. [2:39] I mean, as a commander in Europe, I had threats against me. [2:42] And as a commander in Iraq, a division commander, I had threats against me. [2:46] That's why you have security folks and intelligence folks constantly planning your movement. [2:50] But again, as David just said a minute ago, it's what happens to everybody else that's on board. [2:56] You know, it was interesting to me. [2:58] And I was in Baghdad in 2004, 2003, when President Bush came over on Air Force One in a surprise visit for Thanksgiving. [3:06] Your colleague, Nicole Wallace, once told me she was not allowed to go on that flight because the president deemed it too dangerous going into Baghdad on Air Force One. [3:16] He came in in the middle of the night. [3:17] No one was doing it. [3:19] So the Secret Service didn't want him to do it. [3:21] But they secured the ground and he visited the troops on Thanksgiving Day. [3:25] So you have these kind of actions all the time. [3:27] I mean, I would guess that there's probably a dozen or more threats against the president or members of the cabinet's lives every week. [3:36] So, Peter, I mean, you've been a White House correspondent forever. [3:39] You've been on Air Force One more times than I can count, I'm sure. [3:43] What do you sign up for when you travel with the president? [3:48] Well, look, I think you do recognize that as a reporter, you travel in, you know, a bubble, right? [3:53] You're inside the Secret Service bubble, but the only person the Secret Service cares about when push comes to shove is going to be the guy who was elected, right? [4:02] They don't care about the reporters or the government officials or anybody else around them, and they shouldn't. [4:06] That's not their job. [4:07] Their job is to worry about him. [4:08] So you know as a reporter that there is some threat. [4:10] You know, there's a legendary story that JFK came to the back of the plane one time when it was flying. [4:17] I was not there. [4:17] I've been covering it for a long time, not that long. [4:19] But he said, you know, guys, if the plane goes down, you're going to be in the last paragraph saying others killed included, right? [4:26] And that's true. [4:26] We knew that. [4:28] What's different here, a couple of things. [4:30] First of all, let's put aside the reporters, okay? [4:32] Nobody's going to grieve for a bunch of reporters or think that we should be whining about anything like that. [4:38] I'm more interested in the fact that the plane took off anyway with the Secretary of State on board and the Secretary of Treasury on board and a couple other, you know, very senior White House officials, [4:48] Stephen Chung, Stephen Miller, people like that were on the decoy plane. [4:51] You're showing the list of people who were not on the decoy plane, right? [4:54] These are people who the president took with him on what's called a safe plane, for lack of a better word, the one that they did not advertise was carrying the president of the United States. [5:04] The one that theoretically they thought people would have thought would carry the United States included an awful lot of other people of a senior rank, [5:10] which begs the question, why did they fly the plane if they thought it was not safe? [5:14] There could have been other options, but let's just say that they worked that through and decided it was worth the risk. [5:20] The other thing that's different about this than the instance that General Herzlund talking about with presidents going to Iraq or Afghanistan and all of our recent presidents have done that, [5:28] the difference is that in those cases they were disclosed after the fact, right? [5:33] They were kept secret. [5:34] Reporters were brought along on all those trips, including Biden's train trip into Ukraine, [5:37] but they were sworn to secrecy until the presidents had left, you know, any kind of harm's way. [5:43] In this case, that wasn't the situation. [5:46] Reporters were not clued in as to what was happening and nor was the public told after it was over and after the president had left Ankara, [5:53] returned back to Washington, was clearly in the safe zone. [5:57] Nobody bothered to clear up the record. [6:00] Why does that matter? [6:01] Why would they need to clear up the record, Peter? [6:03] Well, I think for credibility, if nothing else, you want to believe that presidents and people around them mislead only in those extreme of circumstances [6:13] and that otherwise you can trust that, you know, when we think the president's on the plane, he's on the plane, right? [6:17] That you're not going to be left doubting the veracity of what you're being told day in and day out [6:23] and that any, you know, variations from that standard should be rare and should be then, you know, cleared up after the fact [6:32] so that people can trust what government is telling them as much as possible. [6:36] Now, maybe that seems quaint. [6:37] Maybe that seems old fashioned. [6:39] But every other president, Republican and Democrat, recognize, I think, the importance of that, [6:43] even after doing some of these secret trips like Bush, Obama, Biden and so on. [6:50] Mark, so what about the other officials that were left on the decoy plane? [6:53] I know the Secret Service has the primary mission is to keep the president safe. [6:58] Don't they have a mission to keep other top cabinet officials safe as well, [7:02] especially someone as high up as Marco Rubio, the secretary of state? [7:07] Mark Short. [7:08] Well, Katie, thanks for having me. [7:10] Look, I think that their first and foremost responsibility is to protect the president of the United States. [7:15] And I think, you know, we don't have every bit of information that they had at that time. [7:19] And I think also that the Secret Service is predominantly supposed to protect the president, [7:25] the vice president. [7:26] A lot of other cabinet officials have their own protective services by the federal government [7:30] that is not part of the Secret Service. [7:32] And so I think that there's part of this that we don't have the full information at this point [7:38] to decide what they knew and why they made decisions to remove the president from the plane. [7:43] But again, I think that it's pretty remarkable how nimble they're able to react in a situation like that [7:49] in which they probably gathered that intel at a late time. [7:53] I think that's correct. [7:54] And I think the Secret Service did, from what we can gather, at least from here, [7:58] a pretty remarkable job hiding and removing the president. [8:01] What about the president's own responsibility? [8:04] You heard General Hurtling say a moment ago that he had an example from Nicole Wallace [8:11] and the president saying it wasn't safe enough for her to travel with him years ago. [8:16] What's the duty the president himself has to the people that surround him, [8:21] not just his cabinet officials and his staffers, but to the press? [8:26] I mean, does he have a duty to make sure that they are in a safer position as much as he possibly can? [8:32] Did that plane need to take off? [8:34] Could they have delayed it? [8:35] I mean, was there something else that could have happened to not make them unwitting decoys to hide him? [8:43] Yeah, again, I don't have all the information really, Katie, to be able to make that determination. [8:47] I know in the first administration, I traveled with the vice president on a plane that included press [8:53] that was unmarked to visit the troops over the holidays into a war zone. [8:57] And so, you know, we're perfectly giving information to the press and trusting them to keep it confidential. [9:03] But I don't know the president has an obligation to share all. [9:07] I do agree with what Peter said, though. [9:09] I think there's a difference between not sharing and misdirecting and giving wrong information. [9:14] And that that I think does fall on the president. [9:16] But as far as what the Secret Service did, I think that I can't find any fault with the way they handled this. [9:22] General Hurtling. [9:22] Yeah, Katie, I'd run counter to that and say that there is such a thing called a duty to warn. [9:29] Anytime you have people around you and you know that they might be in trouble and you're trying to get out, [9:34] their duty is to warn them what is going on. [9:37] I'll pose the hypothetical situation. [9:39] What happens if the president is scurried off to another plane? [9:42] He takes off. [9:43] Air Force One takes off from the runway and they do get shot down with a surface to air missile. [9:49] And X number of people are killed in the crash. [9:54] And then it's later found out that the president knew that there was a threat to the prep to that plane with the reporters and the other cabinet members. [10:01] And yet he did nothing about it. [10:02] So I agree with you that there is the potential for saying, hey, you're not going this Air Force One that you're on right now is not going anywhere tonight. [10:09] Go back to your hotel rooms. [10:11] We'll get you out tomorrow. [10:12] They don't have to know that the president's left on another plane, but that could also have been part of the deception method that they use. [10:20] I'm concerned about the way this went down. [10:23] There's such a thing called empathy, especially when you're a leader and you know that you're putting other lives at risk. [10:29] If you know there's a potential operation going on to assassinate or knock down an aircraft.