CNN Panel Melts Down When Batya Ungar-Sargon Points Out the DIA Head Fired by Hegseth Was ‘Objectively Terrible at His Job’

PHILLIP: “John, the thing about it, though, is that it’s not even so much that whatever this initial assessment was, was the Bible, right? It’s just an initial assessment. And the intelligence agencies, I presume, ought to have the ability to go through that process and have versions that are updated as time goes on without fear of retribution.”
UNGAR-SARGON: “I’m sorry. This person was objectively terrible at his job.”
PHILLIP: “Why do you say that?”
UNGAR-SARGON: “Because we bombed Fordow in June, and he said right after that — and it was leaked right after that at a sensitive time that we only set it back, the Iranians’ capabilities, nuclear capabilities by months. It has been months since then, it’s been two months since then. This was obviously nonsense. The Israeli intelligence told us that we had set it back by years. It was obvious from the footage that the report could only have been this wrong if it was politically motivated.”
PHILLIP: “That is only the view you would come to if you don’t understand how intelligence gathering works, and/or you don’t care how intelligence gathering works, and you don’t appreciate the fact that more information is gathered over time, and that there are often disagreements between agencies about what they understand to be the facts of the situation. All of that is normal. None of that is new. Not every assessment is all the same, because that would negate the point of having multiple agencies doing assessments.”
UNGAR-SARGON: “That’s why you shouldn’t allow sensitive assessments that are going to be proved to be very wrong very quickly — “
FUGELSANG: “When Donald Trump bombs Iran, when he bombs Iran again in four months, what will you say? When he bombs Iran again, when the Epstein papers flare up and he has to go there again — “
UNGAR-SARGON: “I know you can just sit here and make stuff up and then not feel responsible four months from now to come back and say, ‘I was wrong, I was wrong about that.’”
PHILLIP: “I just wonder if the expectation at this moment now under Trump is that, you know, you should only produce information for Trump if it — if it — if you know for sure that it’s going to align with what the president wants to hear. And if it doesn’t, then don’t bother to even do anything.”
LATHAN: “If that’s not the feeling now, it very soon will be. And it just makes us weaker. A lack of truth always makes you weaker. We won’t be — we won’t really know where we stand geopolitically if we can’t give accurate information to the president for fear of him firing you. We won’t know where we stand economically if we can’t be truthful about the job numbers because you’ll lose your job if you tell the president the truth. And, like, spinning these lies — “
UNGAR-SARGON: “But these people all got things very wrong — “
LATHAN: “Like, spinning these lies — but the reality is, like, in this — in this particular situation, having to yes-man the president on issues that are this big and this fundamental to people’s lives makes people less safe.”
UNGAR-SARGON: “Don’t you think people should be fired if they are very wrong and their job is to produce intelligence?”
FUGELSANG: “What if they lie? What if they can’t stop lying?”
DAVISON: “If we assume that this firing was political, who is to say we can’t assume that the leaking of the information from a Biden appointee wasn’t political? Why do we give that a free pass?”
PHILLIP: “Actually, I don’t think we know where the leak — “
DAVISON: “Now we don’t know.”
PHILLIP: “No, no, no, no, no, the leaking specifically. I mean, I think that you all have made the assumption that he leaked the information. I don’t think that that is what we know either based on the reporting or based on anything that the administration has said. So there’s that. But I think the other part of this is that, you know, there are times when there is disagreement within an administration, even between allies. When the Israeli government says one thing about what their intelligence says and our intelligence says something else, who are we to believe, or do we just not want disagreement at all?”
LATHAN: “And also — “
UNGAR-SARGON: “They waited two months and it was shown that this ‘director of intelligence’ was crappy at getting intelligence. And so they fired him for being bad at the job description. Like, that’s totally normal.”
FUGELSANG: “So you’re saying it’s obliterated?”
LATHAN: “I could also argue that there have been other people in the administration that have shown gross incompetence over things, and they have not been fired, like Hegseth with that whole Signal thing and all of that stuff. And the president has rallied around different people that have done things that were massively incompetent to the very lay political minds that could read any newspaper in the country. And rather than fire those people because — or remove those people because they are his people, the president doubled down on his support for them. It seems like it’s — “
UNGAR-SARGON: “He fired Mike Waltz over Signalgate.”
PHILLIP: “Batya, I think you would appreciate this, because wrongness is usually not the main problem when it comes to intelligence gathering. Sameness is. When everybody is rowing in the same direction and there is nobody saying, ‘Hey, I’m not sure that this is right,’ that’s what got us into the wars after 9/11, based on shoddy evidence. So I do think —
LATHAN: “Everyone was telling the Bush Administration what they wanted to hear.”
PHILLIP: “Everyone was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.”
LATHAN: “And then a million people died.”
PHILLIP: “I say that because I know that you are not a fan of those types of conflicts, but I think that it’s important to understand that the issue with the intelligence in moments like that is not that there was one person who was wrong. It’s that everybody was saying one thing and that — that groupthink was wrong.”
UNGAR-SARGON: “Thank you. I appreciate that point a lot. That’s why I started by saying he’s bad at his job because of the combination of the leak and the bad intelligence. You, as the boss, are responsible for the leaks that happen in your department.”
FUGELSANG: “The boss is responsible.”
UNGAR-SARGON: “He needs to take responsibility for what happened.”