Sabrina Singh was Deputy Press Secretary at the Biden White House until she became Deputy Press Secretary at the Pentagon in 2022. On MSNBC's The Weekend on Saturday morning, Singh was still shilling for her old boss, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Displaying some mixture of chutzpah and obliviousness, Singh repeatedly criticized incoming Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as unreliable:
The job of the Secretary of Defense is a 24-hour job. You can get calls in the middle of the night, at all times. I remember my boss, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, being in the Indo-Pacific and getting a call in the middle of the night at 3 a.m. his time. You have to be prepared for different circumstances at any given time.
MSNBC had played a clip of Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) hounding Hegseth's personal behavior as "exploitable by our adversaries"-- i.e., that he could be blackmailed into making decisions contrary to American interests. He claimed he was "incapable of being responsible, accountable, and law-abiding 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as that job requires." All this was an unsubtle allusion to allegations about Hegseth's drinking. Hegseth had pledged not to drink if confirmed.
But Singh's boss Austin is the guy who disappeared from his job for an extended period without notifying President Biden! Who's supposed to remember that? That's impressively reinventing AWOL Austin as a 24/7 guy.
New York Times columnist [and fierce Trump critic] Bret Stephens described Austin as having gone "AWOL," accused him of "dereliction of duty" and demanded his "immediate resignation." Nobody in the pro-Biden media wanted to force a resignation. Biden never asked for anyone's resignation -- most notably after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In addition to that charade, Singh absurdly claimed that Trump ordering 1,500 members of the military to the border endangers military "readiness."
1,500 represents 0.05% of the 2.8 million members of the US military. 0.05% is not 5%. It's one-twentieth of one percent! Expressed as a fraction, that's 1/2000—one two-thousandth of the military!
Singh's double standard was also on display regarding the ordering of troops to the border. She claimed that Trump sending 1,500 troops endangers military readiness. But Singh mentioned that, at one point, Biden had sent 2,000 troops to the border. Yet for some reason, that apparently didn't compromise readiness in Singh's mind. Singh's career in Democrat Party PR was a perfect match for MSDNC.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
The Weekend
1/25/25
8:09 am ET
JACK REED: We are advising and consenting on the nominee for Secretary of Defense. And we cannot risk installing a leader who may have a history that is exploitable by our adversaries. Nor can we risk confirming a Secretary of Defense who has shown that he is incapable of being responsible, accountable, and law-abiding 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as that job requires.. . . SABRINA SINGH: I think what Senator Reed said is very important. The job of the Secretary of Defense is a 24-hour job. You can get calls in the middle of the night, at all times. I remember my boss, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, being in the Indo-Pacific and getting a call in the middle of the night at 3 a.m. his time.
You have to be prepared for different circumstances at any given time.
So now, incoming Secretary Hegseth is walking into a building where you have the acting secretary deployed 1,500 more troops to the border. That's going to impact readiness. That's going to impact how the force posture looks.
. . .
But he's walking into things that are going to require 24-7 monitoring.
. . .
The problem here is that these troops, 1,500 additional troops, are being sent to address a so-called crisis that we've actually seen migration numbers go down.
So you're pulling troops, like you mentioned the Marines, and other units, out of their traditional missions, out of their, things that they are regularly training for, which at the end of the day is going to get to a readiness issue.
