Several of the top Trump administration officials involved in the leak of war plans to a private online chat previously called for criminal prosecution when former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s private emails were leaked.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance were in the text chain where plans to launch a military strike against Yemen were discussed. Also on the chain was Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who disclosed the insecure backchannel in a story released Monday.
During the 2016 election cycle, Republicans and the mainstream media repeatedly attacked Clinton for having a private email server when she was secretary of state. A subsequent State Department investigation in 2019 (under the Trump administration) determined that there was “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
Before Donald Trump picked him to be secretary of defense, Hegseth was a Fox News talking head, and in that capacity, Hegseth repeatedly attacked Clinton over the issue for years.
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Pete Hegseth in 2016: "If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now... because the assumption is in the intelligence community, if you are using unclassified means, there is the potential for and likelihood that foreign governments are targeting those accounts."
— Matthew Gertz (@mattgertz.bsky.social) 2025-03-24T18:51:14.043Z
“If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now,” Hegseth said of the disclosure in 2016. He added, “If you are using unclassified means, there is the potential for and likelihood that foreign governments are targeting those accounts.”
Hegseth also said there were “national security implications” for using the server and “reckless,” arguing that it endangered military and intelligence forces. He argued that the existence of the server was “damaging” America’s “ability to recruit or build allies with others,” describing the practice as “gross negligence.”
During the nomination process, red flags were constantly raised about Hegseth’s ability to handle the job he had been offered. Multiple stories of alleged abusive behavior, public drunkenness, financial mishandling, and bigotry were ignored by Senate Republicans who pushed his nomination through on a partisan vote.
“Soooooo we thinking old Pete was drunk or the job or what?” Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett asked. “It would be funny, if it wasn’t scary! Maybe we need some DEI (definitely earned it) hires to get this shit together because the incompetence is OVERWHELMINGLY problematic.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was on the newly disclosed text chain, went after Clinton as well when he was a senator. “Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton, even though she thinks she is,” Rubio said in 2016.
Waltz complained in 2023 that the Department of Justice did “not a damn thing” about Clinton’s emails.
Republicans have tried to spin the fallout from the damaging national security moment.
Trump attacked The Atlantic, who previously reported on his smears of deceased military veterans, and amplified an Elon Musk post mocking the publication in the wake of its reporting. He later praised Waltz as a “good man” and downplayed the leak as merely a “glitch.”
Hegseth initially tried to argue that the entire story was made up.
“Nobody was texting war plans,” he told reporters on Monday. But at the same time he was saying this, the White House National Security Council admitted that the texts to Goldberg “appear[ed] to be authentic.”
Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters, “What you did see, though, I think was top level officials doing their job, doing it well, and executing on a plan with precision.”
What should happen following the disclosure? Current CIA Director John Ratcliffe argued in 2018 following disclosure of a leak to The New York Times, “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.”
When the target was Clinton, Republicans were ready to throw the book at her—even though she hadn’t revealed anything remotely as sensitive as what Hegseth and company have done. Now that they are under fire, the party is more interested in moving on like nothing happened.
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