So Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server led to calls for her to be imprisoned, but Pete Hegseth and friends can have a Signal group chat about bombing a terrorist group and it’s no big deal? Apparently so, and while it’s infuriating, it’s not overly surprising.
Repeating “but her emails” every time a Donald Trump administration does something egregious has become a cliché for a reason. However, in the wake of the genuinely shocking revelation that Hegseth and other senior members of Trump’s national security team discussed a US bombing campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen on a Signal group chat—one they apparently accidentally included Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg on—it bears repeating, again.
Clinton herself can’t believe it either.
“The hypocrisy is staggering, but worse, the arrogance and incompetence puts the lives of our military men and women in danger,” she tells Glamour exclusively, in her first public comments on the matter since a post on X on Monday.
If you have spent the last few days in a hyperbaric chamber without internet or television access (jealous) and have somehow missed this story, a brief refresher. On Monday, Goldberg, who is a deeply respected, award-winning editor and longtime national security reporter, published an article with this jaw-dropping headline: “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”
As Goldberg explains, a few weeks ago he received a connection request on Signal, an encrypted messaging app popular with journalists, from a user named Michael Waltz. Goldberg assumed that this Waltz was the same one currently serving as Trump’s national security advisor, but didn’t think the request actually came from him directly.
Then Waltz added Goldberg to a chat called “Houthi PC small group,” populated with users purporting to be top Trump officials like Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. No one questioned why Goldberg, identified as “JG” in the chat, was in there or who he was, and the group soon began discussing plans for an imminent attack on the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militia group, in Yemen.
Goldberg writes he initially did not believe the chat was real, but once plans that were shared in the chat came to fruition—i.e., bombing campaigns started in Yemen—he realized the whole thing was no joke. After Goldberg exited the chat and informed the administration, a spokesperson for the National Security Council told the magazine that the chat appeared to be “authentic.”
The Trump administration officials involved in the chat responded to the initial article by obfuscating and downplaying it, with Hegseth telling reporters that “nobody’s texting war plans.” So on Wednesday morning, The Atlantic decided to release the entire conversation in full, including details from Hegseth that sure look a lot like war plans.
There are many reasons to be angry about this bombshell: the fact that senior government officials would be so careless with this type of information, the harm the recklessness could have caused to American service members involved in the operation, and the casualness with which these so-called leaders discussed the killing of their human targets (using things like American flag and fire emojis to cheer on the bombing). But one of the most egregious is the dizzying hypocrisy shown by several members of the chat, including Hegseth, Rubio, and Waltz. It’s almost as if the email scandal, which Clinton herself considers a major factor in her 2016 loss to Trump, was never really about “national security” at all.
Let’s go back to 2015, when Clinton was gearing up for her presidential run. In March of that year, The New York Times reported that Clinton had used a private email server to conduct business when she was serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
Well, we all know what happened next. The emails became a huge scandal—a State Department audit found that she had violated federal record-keeping rules—and many, including Clinton herself, believe that then FBI director James Comey’s choice to reopen the probe into them 11 days before the 2016 election directly contributed to her loss against Trump.
What many have argued in the last two days is that if Clinton was hauled over the coals for her emails, surely the “Houthi PC small group” Signal chat members should face similar scrutiny. Certainly, the majority of the members of this Signal group criticized Clinton harshly at the time.
“If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they’d be in jail right now,” said Hegseth in an undated appearance on Fox News’ Outnumbered, where he worked before becoming SecDef.
“Talk about a DOUBLE STANDARD: Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent top secret emails to Hillary Clinton’s private account and the DOJ didn’t do a DAMN THING about it,” wrote Waltz on X in 2023, in one of multiple screeds about the scandal. “No wonder Americans are losing faith in our justice system.”
“It goes to the issue of both competence and credibility,” mused Rubio in a 2015 appearance on CBS Evening News.
Putting the blatant hypocrisy aside, it’s important to note the difference between how this group of men (only two women, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, were in the chat) are being treated in response to this scandal. To be sure, many Democratic politicians, including senators Jon Ossoff, Mark Warner, and Mark Kelly, decried the actions at a Tuesday Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, with Warner calling it “reckless, sloppy, and stunning.” The incident has sparked national outrage in both the mainstream media and social media platforms, with even some Republican lawmakers saying they were looking for answers. But many in the MAGA corner of the world have explained the controversy away as an understandable mistake by officials who are qualified, yet human.
“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” said Trump in an interview with NBC News, adding that he would not be firing Waltz over the incident.
It seems that in this instance, as in countless others, men in power are allowed to make mistakes while women are expected to be perfect (case in point, Kamala Harris). Yet it goes even deeper than that, because the attack on Clinton over her email server wasn’t just a political one. Over time it morphed into a misogynistic and frightening hate campaign that the Trump machine used to spread what could be construed as violent rhetoric against his opponent, which persists to this day.
You may remember that the email scandal was the genesis of the Trump rallying cry of “lock her up,” which he repeated often and with gusto at his many campaign rallies. The chant was ugly, with many rally-goers escalating it to other chants that grew only more misogynistic.
After Trump emerged victorious in 2016, this rallying cry morphed into a way to attack all women politicians the MAGA crowd disagreed with. In 2020, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer said she believed that the chant, which was deployed against her at rallies, was tied to threats of violence she received both on and offline (in 2020, Whitmer was the target of a kidnapping plot that was thwarted).
“Every single time the President does this at a rally, the violent rhetoric towards her immediately escalates on social media,” the governor’s digital director, Tori Saylor, said on X in 2020. “It has to stop. It just has to.”
The revelation of this group chat seems to be proof that the Clinton email scandal was never really about emails. It was about using a concerning but ultimately not earth-shattering breach of protocol as a way to paint Clinton, the first woman to run for president as a major-party candidate, as a liar and criminal. And once she was demonized, it was easy enough for some to call for her dehumanization, insinuate violence should be used against her, and then deploy the attack on other women who dare defy Trump and his MAGA cohort.
So while yes, it is incredibly frustrating that some in MAGA world are now acting as if the group chat thing is no big deal (when it is a really big deal), what’s even more infuriating is that the men at the center of it will never face the types of attacks Clinton and others have faced. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop pointing that out.
The post Hillary Clinton on the Signal Group-Chat Scandal: ‘The Hypocrisy Is Staggering’ appeared first on Glamour.
