At a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) questioned Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth about the gift of a plane from Qatar.
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00:00On the 747 question, did the Department of Defense initiate the conversation with the Qataris?
00:10Did they initiate the conversation? How did that go?
00:15Senator, I have to go back and review it, but we've been a part of the ongoing conversation.
00:19Yeah, but I think it kind of matters who's asking, doesn't it?
00:21Ultimately, the Defense Department is, or soon will be, when the memorandum of a wonder standard is signed,
00:30in receipt of a gift from the Qatari government that could serve, once it's modified, eventually as something that the president could use.
00:38I mean, I think this is illegal and unconstitutional, and I won't rant about that,
00:41but I actually think, from the standpoint of our collective responsibilities, it very much matters what the paper flow was,
00:48who started these conversations that had come out of the White House, that had come out of the Secretary of State,
00:53or the President, or the SecDef, or at a lower level, or ambassadors.
00:58We're entitled to know, because we can agree or disagree about the propriety of this,
01:03but my basic request of you is that if we're going to disagree, let's disagree with the same set of facts.
01:11Let's have the documentation on the Qatari aircraft.
01:15Let's have the same set of documentation about what these orders do and don't do with respect to Los Angeles,
01:21because if we're just going to screen past each other and then see who succeeds more on the Internet,
01:27that's actually not the way to do this work.
01:30We're supposed to be in struggle against each other, but in a way where we actually have all the information.
01:35You have our information.
01:37We have yours.
01:38And so I'm hoping that we can get some documentation about both matters in a nonpartisan, bipartisan way.