It’s been 10 years since a media firestorm erupted over revelations that my former boss, Hillary Clinton, used a private email server for communications while she was secretary of state. Donald Trump, her opponent in the 2016 presidential race, denounced her and whipped his crowds into a frenzy with his favorite rallying cry: “Lock her up!”
The FBI found no evidence that Clinton’s email domain had ever been hacked, nor was she ever charged with wrongdoing, though she was on a number of email chains that contained classified information. But Trump’s – and perhaps the media’s – relentless hammering of her over her emails is arguably why she lost the election, despite being infinitely more qualified, prepared and suitable for the job.
Now to the staggering hypocrisy and double standard.
Eighteen of Trump’s top national security officials – who know very well that they are required to use secure government devices and secure government facilities for discussions of sensitive national security information – instead used Signal, a nongovernmental commercial messaging app that the Pentagon warned in a March 18 department-wide email is being targeted by Russian hackers. Likewise, the National Security Agency warned that U.S. government officials should not use Signal for sensitive communications because of a vulnerability in the system.
Because national security adviser Mike Waltz inadvertently added a prominent journalist to the Signal group chat, we know that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared real-time Pentagon attack plans on the Houthis in Yemen, information that was both sensitive and secret, regardless of whether the information had been officially classified.
Many of these same now-senior U.S. officials entrusted with Americans’ safety had a decade ago eagerly condemned my old boss, who never shared or exposed anything even approaching real-time attack plans.
In November 2016, Hegseth, speaking on Fox News about Clinton’s emails, asserted that “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.” In another appearance the same month, Hegseth claimed that “people have gone to jail for one one-hundredth of what, even one one-thousandth of what Hillary Clinton did.”
But Trump is not calling to “lock him up” – or anyone else in his administration.
