Hillary Clinton – the former US secretary of state who lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump amid a scandal over her use of a private server for classified emails – reacted to Monday’s news of a leak of highly sensitive military plans at the White House by saying: “You have got to be kidding me.”
Clinton punctuated her reaction on the X platform with an eyes emoji and a link to an Atlantic article that revealed how Trump officials inadvertently broadcast plans of US airstrikes on Houthi rebels through a Signal group chat with a journalist reading along.
Trump and his supporters criticized her ruthlessly for her classified emails and private server use before and after he defeated her in the presidential election nine years earlier, even calling for her to be imprisoned.
Among them were some of the participants in the group chat reported on by the Atlantic: the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; the Central Intelligence Agency director, John Ratcliffe; and the national security adviser, Mike Waltz.
“If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now,” ex-Fox News host Hegseth said on his former network in 2016, as CNN showed in a montage which went viral Monday night.
That same year, Rubio remarked on Fox: “Nobody is above the law – not even Hillary Clinton, even though she thinks she is.”
In 2019, Ratcliffe told Fox: “Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the Espionage Act.”
And in a 2023 CNN appearance, Waltz complained about the lack of prosecution over “the Clinton emails”.
All were appointed to Trump’s cabinet after he won his second presidency in November.
On Monday, the White House confirmed the leak reported by the Atlantic but essentially insisted it had been harmless, demonstrating “deep and thoughtful coordination between senior officials”.
“The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security,” White House spokesperson Brian Hughes told the Guardian.
Hegseth, meanwhile, insulted the Atlantic journalist who was inadvertently brought into his Signal chat, Jeffrey Goldberg, as “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes”. Hegseth asserted: “Nobody was texting war plans,” prompting Goldberg to respond on MSNBC by saying he had seen a “minute-by-minute accounting” of plans to bomb targets in Yemen associated with Houthis.
Asked Monday for his take on Goldberg’s report, Trump claimed: “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic … but I know nothing about it.”
By Tuesday, he reportedly told NBC News that Waltz “has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man”. He also echoed Hughes in claiming Goldberg’s presence in the Signal chat “had no impact at all” on the ensuing military operation.
Clinton served as secretary of state under former president Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. Her husband Bill Clinton was president for two consecutive terms beginning in 1993.
As Hillary Clinton ran for the presidency, the FBI’s then-director James Comey said there was evidence she had either sent or received 113 emails on a private server with information that was classified at the time of the correspondence. Information in another 2,000 emails or so was later classified.
Comey said Clinton had been “extremely careless” but had not acted in a way deserving criminal charges.
