Before He Sent War Plans in a Non-Secure Groupchat, the Head of the Pentagon Said People Who Did That Should Be Fired

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used to think that sharing classified information in insecure channels was a fireable offense — until he got caught doing it himself.

Following the stunning revelation from The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg that he'd been added to a national security adviser groupchat on Signal, CNN has unearthed instances when Hegseth went off on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for using a private email server for official communications and deleting the evidence after the fact.

"People have gone to jail for 1/100th of what — even 1/1,000th of what Hillary Clinton did," Hegseth, then a regular fixture on Fox News, opined on the right-wing network just ahead of the presidential election in November 2016.

This was around the time, if you recall, when "lock her up!" became a regular rallying cry at Donald Trump's campaign events. To Hegseth, Trump, and their ilk, Clinton discussing official matters on her own server — which was, we should add, an egregious breach that may well have cost her that election — was enough to inspire bloodthirsty chants.

Less than a year later, the conservative talking head was still beating the drums of justice.

"She is a corrupt politician," Hegseth said on Fox in September 2017, "who reinforced that narrative through her reckless actions."

The GOP isn't known for its sensitivity to hypocrisy. As such, several others in the groupchat created by national security adviser Mike Waltz — and to which Goldberg was inadvertently added — seemed to have no issue with planning a Yemeni bombing campaign on a commercial app, despite it likely being a violation of the Espionage Act.

"Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account," Waltz tweeted in 2023, around the time Trump was indicted for keeping classified documents in boxes at his residence. "And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing."

Along with being oxymoronic, that statement is incorrect. Not only was Clinton investigated by the FBI for her alleged mishandling of official communications — she was called out by then-director Jim Comey over it just before the election, which is probably why she lost.

As Goldberg noted in his stunning piece about the groupchat that Waltz added him to, Hegseth and the other cabinet-level officials in that text chain could, technically, claim that they declassified the bombing plans and other intelligence matters they discussed. The legal experts The Atlantic spoke to noted, however, that that excuse doesn't hold much weight because those sensitive matters were still discussed on an unauthorized platform — and in front of a journalist, which could technically constitute a leak.

Clinton, meanwhile, responded in kind to the entire debacle in a post on X.

"You've got to be kidding me," the former presidential candidate tweeted.

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