The same crowd that said Hillary Clinton should be jailed over her emails is busy now defending top Trump officials for sharing classified military plans with a magazine editor on an unsecured group chat. “You have got to be kidding me,” Hillary wrote on social media. Yes, the joke certainly is on all of us.
Republicans have said mistakes were made, but argued that no repercussions are necessary; President Trump on Tuesday stood by his national security advisor Mike Waltz, saying he’d learned his lesson.
How Waltz mistakenly invited “JG”—Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg—to a top-level natsec text thread on the messaging app Signal used to finalize bombing strikes against the Houthis is just the first layer of this evolving breach.
Another layer, which is arguably far worse, is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sharing battle plans with all 18 top officials—and, yes, one journalist—in the thread. According to Goldberg’s reporting, all could see the scheduled time and place of the attacks, and the weapons being used. (These were lethal airstrikes that killed some 53 people, according to reports.)
“It’s complete malpractice. They were sloppy and careless and could have put Americans’ lives at risk,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way. “(Hillary) never sent a group email out there.”
Indeed, what Hillary did is orders of magnitude less dangerous than Hegseth. What Hillary did was a process error. Her penchant for secrecy after being targeted by the right for so many years ended up giving her enemies what they needed to bring her down. (She had moved all her communications to a private server at her home in Chappaqua; when a small part turned out to be classified, she was put through the wringer.)
But she wasn’t harboring anything dangerous or compromising. The hysterical investigations into her emails—and the suspicions they fed about her intentions and ethics—helped cost her the presidency.
Yes, people do get busted over these kinds of infractions, and some have gone to jail, but there was never any evidence that Hillary had put anyone’s life at risk. She was hung out to dry for political reasons, and scapegoated to sway an election, not because she compromised national security. Nobody ever charged her with incompetence.
Hegseth, meanwhile, is making his shortcomings clear. He has no knowledge of what it means to run the Defense Department, and this action proves it. The people around Trump are chosen for their blind loyalty and their talking head credentials, certainly not their smarts. They are proving to be more headstrong and unhinged than Trump himself.
There’s likely to be no punishment for those involved in this enormous security breach—unless Trump is upset, and so far that doesn’t appear the case. The only thing that has consequences in the Trump administration is offending or embarrassing Trump, and if it’s all over Fox News. Otherwise, it’s a hoax. It’s fake news! It didn’t happen. Tomorrow we’ll be on to something else.
Hillary never got that chance to move on—“lock her up” still rallied the MAGA crowds eight years later. She has never publicly shared what she thinks about this continued campaign against her or, as this group chat mess proves, the double standards it represents. But imagine what’s going down in her group chat today. The Atlantic probably couldn’t print those details either, but this time because of some well-aimed and long overdue expletives.
