Politics

WATCH: Democrat Senator Left Stuttering Amid Grilling From CNBC’s Joe Kernen

Published

4 days ago

March 28, 2025

The steady flow of calls for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to resign has already slowed to a trickle as leading Democratic lawmakers continue to be called out for failing to make the same demands of Lloyd Austin, the former Biden defense secretary who went MIA for two weeks and oversaw the deadly and catastrophic exit from Afghanistan.

U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) became the latest figure on the left singled out for hypocrisy when he appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to continue pushing for Hegseth’s head following the fallout from a private Signal chat where a liberal reporter was inadvertently invited to overhear plans to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Although the mission was carried out flawlessly and the U.S. suffered no casualties, critics have spent most of the week pushing for President Donald Trump to fire Hegseth or National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who admitted to mistakenly inviting The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to view the text chain.

“Secretary Hegseth has put our servicemembers in danger and our credibility as a security partner at risk. He can no longer credibly claim that he makes our country safer. For the good of our nation, he must resign,” Sen. Coons wrote in a statement on Wednesday.

That didn’t sit well with Kernen, who asked the Delaware Democrat if he called for Lloyd Austin’s resignation after it was discovered in late 2023 that he was incommunicado with the Defense Department while seeking medical treatment and set up no chain of command in his stead.

Speaking about the disastrous 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the CNBC host challenged Coons, “Not only did we lose 13 servicemembers, we left $70 billion worth of equipment that fell into the hands of the Taliban.”

According to Sen. Coons, it’s impossible to equate Hegseth’s security lapse with those of Austin

“There is nothing that Lloyd Austin did by getting healthcare treatment that put our national security at risk,” he stammered.

Kernen was incredulous. “The statute of limitation is over for four years?” he asked facetiously.

Even Coons, a progressive bulwark, was forced to admit that the attack on the Houthis was “a success,” even as he claimed Hegseth violated a recent Pentagon directive against using Signal. Left unsaid was a longstanding policy by the Biden-Harris administration to pre-install the encrypted communication app on government phones for the past four years.

WATCH:

Pushed again on whether the Afghanistan withdrawal should have led to a high-level resignation, Coons appeared to blame President Donald Trump for forcing the hand of former President Joe Biden.

“It was a mistake for Donald Trump to negotiate with the Taliban, an agreement for winding down the Afghanistan war-”

“Afghanistan was Trump’s fault?” Kernen shot back.

“If you’ll let me finish my sentence,” Coons snapped. “It was a mistake to negotiate an end to that war that put Biden in a box. The execution of the withdrawal from Afghanistan was badly handled, and the loss of those 13 Marines was a tragedy.”

The CNBC host tried to pin Coons down one more time before moving on.

“I don’t know whether Lloyd Austin’s the person who should have been held accountable for it, but there should’ve been accountability,” Coons replied.