Maritsa Georgiou, who hosts the podcast "Grounded" with former Sen. Jon Tester, beaks down the week's top political headlines with Scripps News.
This week, President Donald Trump announced that Mike Waltz will leave his job as national security adviser and be nominated as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Only months into the job, Waltz sparked controversy by creating a Signal group chat to discuss sensitive plans for strikes on the Houthis in Yemen — and mistakenly adding The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the conversation.
Georgiou says the controversy has brought new scrutiny on Walz from those within Trump's circle.
"I really think the question around this won't really be about Mike Waltz or Pete Hegseth," Georgiou said. "I think the name that we should be talking about is Laura Loomer, because she called for this last week in a conversation with Tara Palmeri on her podcast and Substack. And she basically was asked directly, 'Who would you fire or advise the president fire next?' She was a little bit coy at first and then said, 'Well, I think that [Waltz] is not loyal to President Trump.' And she brought up a video that he recorded in 2016. Mike Waltz going after President Trump, then candidate Trump, over his comments about John McCain and other veterans. So I think this goes deeper than just Signal-gate."
RELATED STORY | White House orders halt on federal funding for NPR and PBS
The White House announced late Thursday that it is instructing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop funding National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, claiming the CPB subsidizes "biased media."
President Donald Trump signed an executive order preventing CPB from funding NPR and PBS, as well as organizations that utilize NPR and PBS programming.
"I think in short we're going to see this end up in court," Georgiou said. "The PBS president has already called this blatantly unlawful. NPR said that they vowed to fight this. You're really seeing a lot of PBS and NPR stations saying, 'well, what does this mean for us, exactly?' I have a lot of friends who work in public broadcasting and they're very concerned specifically about the smaller more rural stations across the country where they might not have any other source for news. And let's not forget emergency information like storm warnings, tornado warnings, that kind of thing. NPR and PBS hit, they estimate, about 99% of the country. So I think that we are not going to see the end of this fight just yet."
Watch the full interview with Georgiou in the video above.
