Several high-profile officials in President Donald Trump's administration were recently caught in a scandal after text messages discussing classified war plans made their way to a journalist. Now, their past remarks over a different scandal involving classified information are coming to light.
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg wrote an article on Monday entitled: "The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans," which set off a firestorm of criticism over the information security practices of the administration's senior-level officials. In the group text that inadvertently made its way to Goldberg, several Trump Cabinet officials like National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, among others, are seen discussing details involving airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The texts were sent on the messaging app Signal, which, while encrypted, is still relatively vulnerable compared to secured government phones. Goldberg noted in his report that Signal "is not approved by the government for sharing classified information." Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reacted to the news with an open-eye emoji, tweeting: "You have got to be kidding me."
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In a thread on X, Sarah Longwell — who is publisher of the anti-Trump conservative news outlet The Bulwark — compiled a series of video clips of some of the Trump Cabinet officials in the text thread offering their take on Clinton's use of a private email server ahead of the 2016 election.
"Mishandling classified information is a still a violation of the Espionage Act," Ratcliffe said in a Fox News clip from 2016. "It started with Hillary Clinton, it has continued without accountability, people haven't paid a price for that."
"Neither she nor any of these other people are going to be above the law," Rubio said in a Fox News segment posted to his official Twitter account. "Whether it's her, or Eric Holder for what he did on Fast and Furious, we're going to hold people accountable."
"Apparently, the standard operating procedure inside the Clinton secretary of state office was to send emails that couldn't otherwise be printed to the maid to print them out of a secure area, or from a secure area, and then hand them off," Hegseth said just one day before the 2016 election. "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."
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Watch the videos in Longwell's thread below, or by clicking this link.