But Her Emails?
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Nothing revitalizes an old franchise like an ambitious crossover event, and this week, two of the dominant memes of the first Trump administration came back and combined forces: But her emails! and There’s always a tweet.
Yesterday, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported on being inadvertently added to a Signal thread of Cabinet members planning a strike on Houthi militants in Yemen. The result is an unprecedented real-time look into policy discussions among top officials in the Trump team. The fact that these leaders were using Signal, an off-the-shelf application, to conduct sensitive national-security discussions is scandalous, and the fact that a journalist whom President Donald Trump has excoriated was sent “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing” shows why. Signal is encrypted, but it is not secure from human error; the thread may not have been preserved as required by law; and these discussions are meant to be conducted in other forums.
All of this would be bad enough if Trump had not spent much of the 2016 campaign (and later) criticizing his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, for her mishandling of classified information while secretary of state. As the chaotic first Trump presidency unfolded, Clinton backers used But her emails! as a rueful shorthand whenever a new scandal occurred. Meanwhile, journalists noticed that whenever Trump committed some infraction, there was likely to be a past tweet from Trump criticizing someone else for doing a similar thing. Now the gap between what Trump and his aides said about Clinton and what they did while in power is once again impossible to ignore.
“One point that doesn’t get made enough about Hillary’s unsecured server illegally used to conduct state business (obviously created to hide the Clintons’ corrupt pay-for-play): foreign adversaries could easily hack classified ops & intel in real time from other side of the globe,” Stephen Miller, who appears to have been in the group chat with Goldberg, posted in 2022.
“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,” current National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who added Goldberg to the chat, wrote on X in 2023. In 2016, now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also apparently in the chat, complained that then-President Barack Obama was protecting “political cronies” and demanded accountability for Cabinet members.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, yet another member of the Signal thread, noted in 2019, “Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the Espionage Act … There does need to be accountability there.” (The White House contends that no classified information was shared on the recent thread, although even if true, that distinction may not matter for the purposes of the Espionage Act.) Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, another apparent participant, warned just this month: “Any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.” (Senator Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, has already asked to circle back on that.)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who evidently sent the detailed plans to Goldberg on Signal, was particularly prolific in his past condemnations. He said on one Fox Business show in 2016 that Clinton should face criminal charges and accused her on another one of betraying her country by exposing “sources and methods” to potential foreign surveillance. “Who knows what they heard and what they have?” he wondered. On a third Fox show, he noted, “The assumption is in the intelligence community, if you are using unclassified means, there is the potential for and likelihood that foreign governments are targeting those accounts and gathering intelligence from them.”
“How damaging is it to your ability to recruit or build allies with others when they are worried that our leaders may be exposing them because of their gross negligence or their recklessness in handling information?" he wondered. In 2023, discussing Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, Hegseth thundered that no one could be confused about when they were handling secret information. “If at the very top there’s no accountability,” he said, then there are “two tiers of justice.” (Hegseth, showing why he was an effective Fox host and why he’s maybe not a very effective public servant, immediately jumped into high dudgeon yesterday, attacking Goldberg as a hoax peddler—never mind that the White House had already confirmed the chat was genuine.)
Clinton couldn’t resist weighing in, posting the story and commenting, “????You have got to be kidding me.”
Perhaps these folks have a more, let’s say, nuanced view of the need for strict enforcement now that they are the ones involved. If so, then members of the administration who were not involved will have to guarantee accountability—perhaps the president, at whose pleasure all of these officials serve. Trump, however, today insisted that “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.” Oh well.
This is not the Trump team’s first incident of mishandling sensitive information and government records. In 2017, Trump blurted classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting; it’s not illegal for the president to disclose such information, but it is imprudent. Similarly, in 2019, he posted an image taken by a highly secret spy satellite. The same year, a lawyer for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump told a House committee that they used WhatsApp for official business, a potential violation of the law.
Most infamously, Trump absconded with boxes of highly sensitive information when he left office in 2021, haphazardly storing them at Mar-a-Lago—including in a bathroom and on a ballroom stage—and allegedly went to great lengths to hide them from the FBI, including after a subpoena. (Trump claimed he’d declassified the documents, but provided no evidence for that.) He avoided prosecution by being elected president, in the most maddening accountability failure involving Trump. In a gesture of impunity, he recently took the materials back.
As this sordid history suggests, charges of hypocrisy against Trump over the Clinton emails are unlikely to sway his most fervent fans. The attacks on Clinton weren’t really about classified information—they were a way for Trump to signal (no pun intended) to a tranche of voters that he hated the same people they did.
But most people are not die-hard Trump partisans, and even if the hypocrisy doesn’t move them, the sloppiness involving military secrets should. The biggest scandals, the editor Tina Brown notes, are the ones that are easiest to understand: He covered up a break-in. He had an affair with an intern. This one is simple and, as Goldberg told me yesterday, relatable: Many people have misdirected an email or text message. “Relatable” is probably also not the optimal mode for the most sensitive matters of national security, though.