In the battle of the unrelated Collinses, Doug seems to have rhetorically razed Kaitlan.
For those of you who missed the battle of the week on Thursday night, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins appeared on CNN, where he was being interviewed by primetime anchor and chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins.
He thought it was supposed to be about veterans. She thought it would be better to spend the time talking about something he didn’t know — namely, “Signal-gate,” the pseudo-scandal which involves the chat where administration officials were discussing a strike on the Houthi rebels in Yemen on the encrypted messaging app with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg accidentally invited to the chat.
Let’s leave aside the fact that, by the time this took place on Thursday, there really wasn’t any more to the scandal other than whether someone would get fired over that. (TL;DR: We’ll see, but not now.)
However, it’s pretty bad form to invite a VA official on and then talk about something other than veterans that he had no awareness of. So, he decided to turn the tables and ask off-topic questions of his own. She didn’t like that. There’s a shocker.
A viral clip of the exchange, posted on X by the White House’s Rapid Response 47 account, begins with another badgering question about The Atlantic’s obtaining of the messages.
“Do you believe that a mistake was made, though, to have this conversation to out a reporter and to have it on an un unsupported … classified group setting?” Kaitlan asked.
“Kaitlan, I’ve just told you, I’ve just answered the question,” Doug said. “I wasn’t a part of it and you know, I’m not gonna speculate more than what the president’s already talked about and those who’ve been involved to talked about about the veterans–“
“Yeah, and I have do have questions about the veterans, but given what we saw with the group chat and how this was used, you are a member of the cabinet,” Kaitlan interrupted. “You obviously know these other members, several of them who were in there.
Should every administration official adopt this strategy of commandeering interviews and asking brutal questions?
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“Is this typical for the cabinet to have conversations over Signal? Is this something that you use?
At this point, Doug was exasperated, and did what anyone would do if faced with a barrage of off-topic questions only slightly relating to what he was invited on to discuss: Ask some of his own.
“Kaitlan since you undoubtedly do not want to talk about the VA, I have a question as VA secretary,” he said. is cabin,
“I want to ask you — because I’ve been curious about this, because my job is to take care of veterans — and I would like to know why CNN is hostile to veterans, especially one in Florida where you just had a $5 million dollar defamation suit for defaming a veteran.”
Doug Collins was referring to Zachary Young, a former Navy veteran who won a $5 million judgment against CNN in a Florida court after the network reported he was an “illegal profiteer” for his work getting sensitive targets out of Afghanistan.
“Your employees actually said ‘We’re going to nail him,’” Doug Collins noted. “I have a question for you, Kaitlan: Is that employee still employed? Are you really concerned about veterans?
“So if you want to talk about veterans now, you want to talk to hear from CNN, as the veteran cabinet secretary, why CNN seems to have a problem with veterans.”
Kaitlan seemed to be stunned that that people don’t go along with this. “Well, Mr. Secretary, respectfully, my question was about whether or not you, as a member of the cabinet, use this, and respectfully, I’m conducting the investigation and I do have a lot of questions for you on Veterans Affairs, but I don’t think–“
“No, Kaitlan, I don’t think — what you want to do is talk about a subject I’ve already answered,” Doug continued. “And if you want to continue like this like this, that’s fine, but … it does me no good to speculating on something that I’ve already been asked and answered.”
“So I’ve already asked and answered your question, so why don’t you answer mine?” he added.
“Respectfully, sir, I’m the one who’s asking the questions here,” Kaitlan responded.
Respectfully, madam, you don’t come off looking too good, respectfully, in this situation. Respectfully:
.@SecVetAffairs torches Fake News CNN’s @kaitlancollins: “Since you undoubtedly don’t want to talk about the VA … I would like to know why CNN is hostile to veterans — especially one in Florida, where you just had a $5 million defamation suit…” pic.twitter.com/fwnkeg10Zn
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 27, 2025
Naturally, Kaitlan Collins can’t answer that question without making CNN look terrible. But, hey, at least they dragged “Signal-gate” out for one more day.
Commandeering interviews like this should be the modus operandi for the administration from here on in; both Trump and Vance do this exquisitely and it’s clear Doug Collins does it as well.
If CNN is going to point out the splinter in everyone else’s eye and not flush the log from theirs, that’s fine — the administration can talk about that log every time you try an ambush interview about the splinter. Asking the VA secretary on to talk about veterans and then bringing up a totally unrelated splinter is a new low, but they’ll stoop lower. Rest assured there’s plenty more to grill the fiends on, particularly if they want to have a Collins v. Collins rematch.
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