Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton participates in an event on women’s role in building a climate-resilient world, at COP28 World Climate Summit, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, December 4, 2023.
Amr Alfiky | Reuters
Hillary Clinton on Friday excoriated President Donald Trump and his administration for their handling of the embarrassing leak of U.S. military attack plans to a journalist who was accidentally added to a Signal app text thread with other top officials this month.
“It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity,” Clinton wrote in a New York Times opinion piece.
“We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws,” the former secretary of state wrote.
“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,” Clinton wrote.
“That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.”
Clinton, who Trump defeated in the 2016 presidential election, said the Signal scandal is “the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security.”
The Democrat noted the Trump administration’s firing of federal workers who protect nuclear weapons, shutting down efforts to fight pandemics, and what she called “performative fights over wokeness” by Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC about Clinton’s essay.
Trump and his Republican allies — including people on the Signal chat thread — for years have castigated Clinton for her use of a private email server to conduct official business as secretary of state under then-President Barack Obama.
“Any security professional — military, government or otherwise — would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information,” Hegseth said on Fox News in 2016.
Trump at an October 2016 campaign rally said, “Hillary is the one who sent and received classified information on an insecure server, putting the safety of the American people under threat.”
The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in an article Monday revealed that he accepted a communications request from a Signal app user identified as Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz on March 11, and that he was added two days later to a Signal chat group called “Houthi PC Group.”
The group’s other members were identified as Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, CIA Director Scott Ratcliff and Director of National Intelligence Tusli Gabbard.
Goldberg wrote that the texts on that thread ended up with Hegseth on March 15 texting plans for a plan that “included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing” of attacks on Houthi forces in Yemen, which were launched within hours of Hegseth’s texts.
Goldberg’s article ignited a controversy in Washington, but Trump and White House officials have downplayed the significance of the leak to the journalists, arguing that the information shared with Goldberg was not classified, as some Democrats in Congress have called on Hegseth and Walz to resign or be fired.
“Our service members and our national security deserve more than Pete Hegseth,” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., told NPR. “He is unqualified for this job. And if he doesn’t resign, the president should fire him.”
“This is the kind of thing that gets people killed,” Kelly said. “And there has to be accountability for this.”
Waltz, while a Florida congressman, in June 2023 had tweeted, “How is it Hillary Clinton can delete 33,000 government emails on a private server yet President Trump gets indicted for having documents he could declassify?”
