{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.gallego.senate.gov/news/press-releases/icymi-gallego-continues-to-push-for-oversight-of-uss-lincoln-crew-conditions/", "ICYMI: Gallego Continues to Push for Oversight of USS Lincoln Crew Conditions", "2026-08-14", "2026", "2026-08", "Democrat", "Senate", "AZ", "Ruben Gallego", "G000574", "www.gallego.senate.gov", "gallego", "https://www.gallego.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "\u201cWe Need to Visit the USS Lincoln to Make Sure Hegseth is Not Lying to Us\u201d\n\nWASHINGTON\u2014In case you missed it, yesterday U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) continued to raise the alarm about the dismal reported conditions on the USS Lincoln. During interviews and on social media, he discussed the official oversight visit he is seeking and the military spouse he is in communication with whose husband is on board the carrier.\n\nExcerpts from Senator Gallego\u2019s media interviews:\n\nCNN State of the Union with Jake Tapper\n\n\u201cThese guys [in the Trump Administration] do not care about these men and women. They only want to use them as much as they can and abuse them as much as they can, not really thinking about the best outcome for them. I know it\u2019s hard being in combat zones, but even when I was in some of the hardest days of combat in some of the most dangerous parts of Iraq, I still was able to receive meals and mail and keep morale up. The fact that this administration does not care for these men enough to plan for a proper deployment tells you that they didn\u2019t really care to plan at all for a full war, and don\u2019t care about these men or women.\u201d\n\n\u201cLook, it\u2019s not possible that we have so many family members and sailors reaching out to members of Congress and to the media, and that what we\u2019re seeing with pictures, videos, and text messages is an absolute lie. We know for a fact they\u2019ve only done one port call in their whole deployment. This deployment has already gone 270 days longer than they anticipated. So we know they\u2019re lying.\u201d\n\n\u201cDeal with the problem. Fix the problem. That\u2019s what true leadership is, right? When I was in the hardest of situations and my officers saw that we weren\u2019t doing well, they went and fixed the problem\u2014whether that was trying to get us better meals, better communication, or any type of respite. That\u2019s what you do when you\u2019re a good leader. Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump\u2014all they care about really are the big, flashy things. They\u2019re not really being honest with how this war is going, and because they don\u2019t know how the war is going to end, they don\u2019t know how to actually properly deploy these men. That\u2019s why it\u2019s putting us in this situation right now.\u201d\n\nNPR Morning Edition\n\n\u201cYou do have a lot of men and women that are very young. This is a very formative time for 18, 19, 20-year-olds. It\u2019s the first time they\u2019re away from home. I think people have to remember the stress of being on an aircraft carrier. They have long hours, very tight space, tight quarters. You are dealing with very dangerous situations with weapons, as well as the potential of falling overboard. And when you\u2019re adding the stress of, of isolation, of the job, lack of sleep, you\u2019re going to end up having potentially performance problems. So, the fact that the military, especially Pete Hegseth, are just denying this is just ridiculous. We are able to talk to a lot of these sailors. We are able to talk to their spouses, and this is why I think it\u2019s important they allow us, bipartisan members of the House and the Senate, to go and visit these sailors\u2013something that has happened before to make sure that we know that they\u2019re doing well, and that the Secretary of Defense is not lying to us.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe most important thing I want to make sure people understand that this is not a very uncommon request. As a matter of fact, in the middle of the war that I was in in 2005, in some of the hardest combat of the Iraq War, I was visited by two members of Congress in Haditha, Iraq. So senators and members of Congress being able to helicopter in or take a plane into the aircraft carrier is not unheard of. It\u2019s actually quite common. We do it all the time, and we should be allowed to do it now, considering the stress that these 1000s of sailors are potentially under.\u201d", 1, "2026-08-18T05:27:41Z", "2026-08-18T05:29:06Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.gallego.senate.gov/news/press-releases/icymi-gallego-continues-to-push-for-oversight-of-uss-lincoln-crew-conditions/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9746961295604706, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}