Hillary Clinton gave a withering response to the revelation that top Trump officials had leaked national security secrets on a group chat.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she wrote alongside a side-eye emoji.
On Monday, The Atlantic published a bombshell report revealing that Trump administration officials—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—had discussed highly confidential war plans in a group chat on the commercial messaging app Signal. Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg had inadvertently been added to the chat.
For Clinton, whose 2016 campaign was dogged by relentless attacks over her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state, the irony is rich.
Some of the same officials involved in Monday’s fiasco were among those who, during the 2016 campaign, fueled a political firestorm over Clinton’s use of the private email server at the State Department, which the FBI ultimately deemed “extremely careless” but not criminal.
Rubio blasted Clinton in a Fox News interview in 2015, saying, “The exposure of sensitive information to foreign intelligence agencies by communicating in an insecure manner is incompetence, it is malpractice, it’s inexcusable.”
Waltz, who was the one to invite Goldberg to the group chat, was still bringing up Clinton’s emails in 2023.
“Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing,” he posted on X at the time.
Trump has repeatedly called for Clinton to be jailed for her use of a private email, leading chants of “lock her up!” at rallies.
FBI Director James Comey opened an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email 11 days before the election. Although the investigation reached the same conclusion—that Clinton had been “careless” but not acted criminally—two days before voters went to the polls, Clinton maintained it was “the determining factor” in her loss.
By using the Signal app—which is not approved for sharing classified information—to discuss highly sensitive plans about national security, the administration may have violated several laws, according to Goldberg.
He said the chat should not have been used to discuss military activity given that officials have designed spaces called sensitive compartment information facilities (SCIF) to do so.
Hegseth, meanwhile, was apparently under the impression that security was airtight all along.
“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” he texted the chat, claiming the group was complying with “operational security” while Goldberg was still in the chat.
