The Trump administration officials who discussed potentially classified information in a Signal group chat had spent years attacking Democrats for taking brazen risks with government secrets.
Caught in Hypocrisy
National security adviser Mike Waltz accidentally invited The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a text messaging group, the magazine reported on Monday, where leaders were hashing out a plan for the Pentagon’s strikes against Yemen’s Houthi fighters.
The extraordinary action made some of the nation’s top national security officials look like hypocrites — and possible violators of the law.
Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — all of whom were in the chat — have spent years criticizing top Democrats for improperly handling classified information, most notably former President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account,” Waltz tweeted in 2023, referencing a POLITICO report that Sullivan had sent emails to Clinton’s Gmail account that the State Department considered government secrets. “And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing.”
Hegseth, who reportedly shared key sensitive military details to the group chat about the targets and weapons used in the strike, was a prolific critic of Clinton’s private email use and Biden’s handling of classified documents. He was especially vocal after attorneys discovered classified documents at the former president’s office in Washington and at his Delaware home.
Consistent Hypocrisy
“If the top man in the job handled classified documents this flippantly for that long, why was that the case?” Hegseth said on Fox News in 2023. “Was it really that he didn’t know? Because when you take something out of a [secure classified information facility] if you’re a senator, you know exactly what you’re doing.”
As the news broke, Hegseth posted a video of himself watching an aerial refueling of his aircraft on the first leg of a weeklong Asia trip. Neither the Defense Department nor White House responded to requests for comment.
The Pentagon chief was also a prolific critic of Clinton during the height of the controversy over the former secretary of State’s private internet server.
“If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now,” Hegseth said in 2016 while a Fox News anchor. “Because the assumption is in the intelligence community, if you are using unclassified means, there is … likelihood that foreign governments are targeting those accounts.”
But the use of a Signal group chat raises similar questions about whether discussing classified military plans on personal cellphones poses a national security risk. White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, who also sent messages in the chat, had raised that very issue in a tweet about Clinton’s private email server in 2022.
Foreign “adversaries could easily hack classified ops & intel in real time from other side of the globe,” he said.
The Atlantic also reported that some of the messages on the Signal chat were set to delete after a short period of time, which could violate a federal law that requires officials to keep records of conversations.
Undermining National Security
“That’s why we have other devices,” said one former Defense official who has been involved in planning for military operations and was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “That’s why you get a secure that’s set up in your room. That’s why people just go to the White House.”
Rubio also has spent years excoriating Clinton and other top Democrats for their alleged mishandling of classified documents.
“When I’m president of the United States neither she nor any of these other people are going to be above the law,” Rubio said in a Fox News appearance in January 2016 about Clinton’s use of private email accounts to conduct official business. “People are going to be held accountable if they broke the laws of this country.”
And Ratcliffe has previously pressed for prosecuting officials who mishandle government secrets.
“It’s always a good thing that we see that there is investigation and prosecution of folks if they’re not handling that information appropriately,” he told Fox in 2018 when he was a Texas lawmaker in the House.
Trump administration allies on Capitol Hill, usually quick to jump on Democrats’ handling of classified information, were mum on the subject after Monday’s revelations.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Monday that Waltz and Hegseth should not be disciplined for talking about the strikes in a text chain.
The revelation also risks making the Trump administration look foolish just days after the Defense Department promised to crack down on leaks. Multiple news outlets, including POLITICO, reported that Elon Musk was attending a military briefing on China at the Pentagon — a possible conflict of interest for the billionaire defense contractor.
Joe Kasper, Hegseth’s chief of staff, said the agency was launching an investigation into the leaks. Top Pentagon officials also have made the case that military leaders should be held to higher standards for keeping weapons and secrets secure.
“If you have a private that loses a sensitive item, that loses night vision goggles, that loses a weapon, you can bet that that private is going to be held accountable,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said at a briefing last week. “The same and equal standards must apply to senior military leaders.”
