Hillary Clinton's name has been bandied about recently as a retort for anyone criticizing the Trump administration's involvement in Signalgate. Yet, as Slate put it, the fact that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared specific plans on an imminent attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen via an unsecured app, "is a much bigger security breach than Hillary Clinton's emails."
Just days before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI revealed that it was reopening an investigation into Clinton's use of a private server to send sensitive government emails. The revelation was believed to be one of the factors that lost her the election to Donald Trump.
This week Clinton responded on X, "You have got to be kidding me," after The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg published his article this week revealing that he had been inadvertently included in the messaging chain that revealed the targets, timing, and weapons being used in the bombing raid hours before it happened.
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"It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity," Clinton wrote in an opinion piece for Fridays New York Times. "We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb."
Clinton called the snafu, "the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds" by the Trump administration, which is "squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security."
The administration continues to deny the messaging chain contained "classified information," despite experts and officials maintaining that it did, and Trump continues to stand behind national security advisor Mike Waltz and Hegseth, calling the incident "not a big deal."
But, Clinton wrote that by not taking Signalgate seriously, Trump is "gambling with the national security of the United States," adding, "If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us."