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New Jersey is one of two states that have governor's races this year. It's New Jersey and Virginia, so anything happening in those races is pretty much automatically going to be a national news story. But in the New Jersey race, something has just happened that's a legit bombshell. And it involves not just goings on in New Jersey. It involves the Trump administration.
Unavoidably, the federal government has access to lots of information about you, lots of data that you trust the government to handle responsibly and legally because it's sensitive data about you that could be used for all sorts of nefarious purposes if it was released publicly or got into the wrong hands.
Well, as you know, the Trump administration hasn't exactly been keeping faith with those responsibilities. They have used federal mortgage data to try to go after Democratic Senator Adam Schiff and New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. That's the Trump administration. Using mortgage data from the Federal Housing and Finance Agency to target people President Trump wants targeted. The Trump administration has also started using data from the IRS and data from the Social Security Administration, specifically to target immigrants.
The Trump administration has started demanding records from the states of everybody who's registered to vote in those states. They have said outright they're going to use that data to bring criminal investigations against people whose information is in that data, as states now start to resist handing it over.
Well, along those lines, we now have this new story that relates to the New Jersey governor's race. The Trump administration has apparently released the full military personnel record, the full social security number, and everything of the Democratic candidate for governor in New Jersey. They've released it to an ally of her Republican opponent.
The Democratic candidate for governor in New Jersey is Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill. She spent nearly a decade as a Navy helicopter pilot. Her campaign recently was horrified to realize that the Trump administration had released her private, unredacted full military records to an ally of her Republican opponent's campaign. A donor to that campaign, somebody who Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli says he's considering as his lieutenant governor.
CBS News was first to report that the National Personnel Records Center, which is charged with maintaining personnel records for service members and civil servants of the US government, released Sherrill's full military file almost completely unredacted. The documents included Sherrill's full social security number, which appears on almost every page, home addresses for her and for her parents, life insurance information, Sherrill's performance evaluations.
The federal government released Mikie Sherrill's unredacted file to an ally of the Jack Ciattarelli campaign, who had filed, apparently, a Freedom of Information Request. Such records are not supposed to be made available in full to the public, unless it's been more than 60 years since someone completed their military service, which makes this release potentially a violation of privacy laws.
She's out today with a new TV ad, claims that the law was broken. In this case, the National Personnel Records Center says that they screwed up. They admit that they made a serious error here. They got a FOIA request for publicly releasable information about Sherrill's military record. And they say a technician mistakenly sent the full, unredacted file.
And maybe that is what happened. But, you know, the Trump administration does not have a super strong claim for the benefit of the doubt on stuff like this. Again, the federal agency that gave out the records admits that this was wrong. They've apologized to Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill. They have asked the guy they gave the records to to not disseminate them.
The campaign did not respond to our requests for comment, but a lawyer for the campaign has said they didn't realize the file contained information that shouldn't have been released. The lawyer says once they learned that, they ceased disseminating the material. But with five weeks to go until election day, this is the kind of thing that can not only shake up a race, it can bring national attention to this race for all the wrong reasons.
Joining us now is Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill. She's the Democratic nominee for governor in the great state of New Jersey. Congresswoman Sherrill, thank you very much for being here. I appreciate it.
Well.
Rachel, thank you so much for having me.
Let me ask if I got any of that the wrong way around in how I described it. I know the National Personnel Records Center and the campaign seem to be saying this was all just a regrettable mistake. I have to ask if, if, if there's elements of this that I'm, that I either didn't just explain or that are different in terms of how you see it.
Sure. So what happened was the Trump administration illegally released my unredacted military personnel records to an ally of the campaign, who then shopped it around to press. Even despite being, in his own words, shocked and disgusted when he saw that it contained things like my social security number, my parents' addresses, my 80-year-old parents' addresses. So this was not a known. Not a known that this was information that should not have been in the public.
And if there was any question when they shopped it to the press, the journalist who got it told them, this should not be out here. In fact, he wrote a whole article about it. And warned them that this was not information. And yet they continued to push this information out and have not given it back, have not ceased using it. So it really, you know, what they're putting out is just not true.
Furthermore, when we look at how this happened, when we worked with the journalist who was presented with this information and went back to the archivist to see how this happened, there's no mistake that was made here. This was intentional.
And I'll tell you, if you speak to the professional archivists that were there, remember, Trump fired them. And now Marco Rubio is in charge of the archives, not a professional archivist. You'll hear that it takes months, if not over a year, to get access because they're so behind. And yet what happened here was there was a request for my data a day before my primary. And the gentleman from the ally of the campaign was told, no, you can't have this. You need to meet certain wickets to get it. And then two days after the primary that I won, he found, and I quote, a real helpful person at the archives office to get that information to them.
Now, that's what should have happened. The archives should have requested a signature of mine. They didn't have it. They should have had my social security number. The way they got that was that a technician in the archives went into the VA database, which they had access to as a federal agency. We would not have access to that to get my social security number to then pull my files, which they then gave to this ally of the campaign. Then they should have told the Navy that they had done so. They never did that.
And so there's really no doubt in my mind that this was fully intentional. From the Trump administration to the campaign to attempt to do this. And they've continued now to go after my family, my husband, service my kids in a completely inappropriate way. So I have to, I just have to say to the New Jersey people, if he's doing this to me, a sitting member of Congress and a veteran, imagine what he'll do with your information.
Do you feel like you're running against Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate, but also running against the federal government? I mean, the federal government has this and the US military has this information because we don't have a choice about whether or not they have it. We have to trust that they will safeguard it in a way that's both safe, responsible, and legal. It seems to me like you're up against something that is more than your average political dirty trick.
Yeah, this is pretty low. And that's why I really just have to say thank you to the veterans from across this country, from Korea to Vietnam to the Global War on Terror, veterans from across this country who have reached out in solidarity with me, because this is beyond the pale. Because as veterans, many of us have incredibly high security clearances. I myself had the highest security clearance in the military, and the amount of information our nation has. When they do that, they interview your friends and your neighbors, and they go through your medical records and those of your family and friends. It just to think that you have this, that the government has this information and could use it against you is just completely, completely unacceptable to veterans.
And so I have to tell people out there, thank you so much for your support. And I'm just committing to people in New Jersey, to veterans across this country. I'm running for governor because I can take this. Jack literally can come after me. Donald Trump can come after me, but I am going to be governor, so you don't have to put up with this. So when Trump comes after New Jerseyans and their private data, their social security numbers, their driver's license, I was just talking to Governor Josh Shapiro earlier today. He has told Trump no. And I will tell Trump no when he comes after people in my state, so they don't have to go through this.
Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, Democratic nominee for New Jersey Governor. Thank you. Thank you very much for helping us cover this scandal this.