Sen. Tammy Duckworth said on Sunday that Mike Waltz can expect a “brutal” confirmation hearing to be United Nations ambassador, after he abruptly stepped down last week as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
“It will be a brutal, brutal hearing. He’s not qualified for the job, just by nature of the fact that he participated in this Signal chain,” the Illinois Democrat told Margaret Brennan on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
Duckworth was referring to the massive national security scandal earlier this year, when The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was inadvertently added to a group chat on Signal that included several Cabinet-level officials — including Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, among others. The leaked chat revealed that said leaders were using the unclassified communication line to share classified minute-by-minute details of planned military strikes on Yemen.
Every person in the Signal chat should be fired for not speaking up, Duckworth said Sunday, calling Hegseth the “most untrained, inadequate secretary of defense in our nation’s history.” But almost immediately after reports revealed that Waltz was stepping down as national security adviser, Trump announced plans to nominate him as ambassador to the United Nations.
“He’s failing up, right? He is failing in his job and getting promoted to be ambassador,” Duckworth said. “That’s not what our nation needs at the United Nations. This is a very perilous time for our national security.”
According to Politico, Waltz’s team regularly set up Signal chats to coordinate policy work on Ukraine, China, Gaza, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Waltz also used his personal email account for government communications, according to The Washington Post. Wired reported that a Venmo account suspected to have belonged to Waltz was set as public, allowing potential adversaries to track those associated with him via transactions.
“Now we’re going to put somebody who’s completely incompetent over at the U.N., who’s going to have to be conducting these negotiations, talking with our allies, trying to get them on board with us while we oppose our adversaries,” Duckworth said. “And continuing to fail up is not what we need in the people who represent this country.”
Waltz did not undergo confirmation by the Senate as national security adviser, but will require a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to get confirmed as ambassador. An Iraq War veteran, Duckworth sits on both the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees.
“I’m not open to voting for him, no,” she said. “Because he’s already demonstrated he’s incapable of doing the most basic thing, which is handling classified information.”
Trump first nominated Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) for the ambassador role before withdrawing her name over concerns about House Republicans’ slim majority. The president said Thursday that Rubio will take over as interim national security adviser — on top of his existing responsibilities as secretary of state, acting national archivist and acting administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Duckworth voted in January to confirm Rubio to lead the State Department, but said Sunday she’s not confident he can balance the increasing number of hats he’s been given.