Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele on MSNBC on August 26. 2025

MSNBC host and former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele singled out exchange between President Donald Trump and the U.S. government's top intelligence official as the "dumbest moment" of Tuesday's three-hour Cabinet meeting.

During the Tuesday episode of his show "The Weeknight," Steele played a video of the exchange between Trump and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — which happened in full view of the assembled press — in which Trump asked Gabbard to update him on former President Joe Biden's supposed abuse of "burn bags." In Washington, "burn bags" are bags of documents containing sensitive personal information that are routinely collected and burned, and Trump insisted without evidence that the Biden administration left "burn bags" scattered around the White House supposedly proving that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

"You've also found many bags of information. I think they call them burn bags. They're supposed to be burned and they didn't get burned, having to do with how corrupt the 2020 election was," Trump said. "When will that all come out?"

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"Mr. President, I will be the first to brief you once we have that information collected, but you're right," Gabbard responded.

Steele noted that the panel presently on the show included people who had served in both the White House and the Department of Justice, along with legal experts, who could all provide context on why Trump's remarks were "corrupt and just wrong." He observed to viewers: "What we just heard is some of the dumbest ish you will ever hear." But former federal prosecutor Brendan Ballou told Steele that, despite Trump's comments, Americans opposed to the current administration should have reason to feel hopeful.

"They're scrounging for anything that they can get their hands on," Ballou said. "Anybody that's worked in a SCIF — a secure compartmentalized information facility — is familiar with burn bags. They know the procedures for it. They know that these things are emptied regularly. They are almost literally grasping at straws here."

"...What this says to me is they really don't have anything, right? And what's encouraging is that, look, all these people got pardoned, but 1500 people got charged," he added, referencing the defendants charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. "We had a thousand, roughly 1000 convictions, 200 trials. The information from all of those cases is available online in court dockets. Anybody can access them. That is a history that they are really going to struggle to rewrite, and that they're going to stuff about burn bags suggests that they're really struggling."

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