If conservatives cared about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, then they should be up in arms over Mike Waltz.
The national security adviser and his staff have been using Gmail to communicate, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Waltz and one of his senior aides relied on the commercial email service to discuss “sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict,” according to email receipts obtained by the Post.
But Gmail is not a secure platform to do so. Users effectively sign away their privacy and metadata to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, when they sign up for a Gmail account.
“Every way you interact with your Gmail account can be monitored, such as the dates and times you email at, who you are talking to, and topics you choose to email about,” Rowenna Fielding, founder of privacy consultancy Miss IG Geek, told The Guardian in 2021.
It’s the latest in a growing series of flubs for Waltz, who made Donald Trump furious by accidentally inviting a journalist to a Cabinet group chat on Signal about bombing Yemen last month. Note here: Gmail is even less secure than Signal, which at least is an encrypted communication app.
In the days after the scandal broke, Wired reported that an account sharing the intelligence official’s name had seemingly left his Venmo profile public. In doing so, Waltz disclosed the names of hundreds of his personal and professional associates, including government officials and lobbyists.
And as the scandals pile up, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Waltz’s behavior is more than just a string of isolated mistakes—instead, they suggest a pattern of haphazard carelessness from an individual that should be one of America’s foremost security experts.
Last week, the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that several senior administration officials had their personal data—including account passwords, cellphone numbers, and email addresses—listed online.
Some of the compromised cabinet members include Waltz, as well as National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The foreign publication was able to track down their information via commercial search engines as well as databases composed of hacked customer data.
Meanwhile, Clinton was excoriated by the right for using private email servers as opposed to her government issued address. But the American public has seemingly been able to spot the difference, with more people believing that the Signal scandal matters more than Republicans’ scapegoats.
A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released Sunday suggested that 60 percent of polled Americans felt that the administration’s decision to use Signal was “wrong”—that included 73 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents, and 43 percent of Republicans.
A YouGov survey published last week found that 53 percent of nearly 6,000 polled Americans felt that the Trump administration’s Signal leak was “very serious,” while another 21 percent described it as “somewhat serious.”
Meanwhile, a survey conducted in the wake of Clinton’s email scandal by YouGov and The Economist in March 2015 found that 30 percent of polled Americans felt that Clinton’s server was “very serious.” Another 26 percent noted that it was “somewhat serious” to them.
The post Hillary Clinton Must Be Dying Over Damning New Mike Waltz Report appeared first on New Republic.
