Former U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 presidential campaign was marred by allegations of mishandling classified information on a private email server, weighed in on this week's revelation of attack plans being discussed via the Signal app.
On Monday, The Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed that he had joined a group chat among top Trump administration officials who were discussing an imminent attack on Yemen. On Wednesday, Goldberg released the full contents of the exchange after the Trump administration claimed the information within the chat was not considered classified.
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In her essay published Friday by the New York Times, Clinton did not address her own missteps involving the storage of electronically classified information. But she did call the Trump administration's use of the Signal app "reckless" and "dangerous."
"It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws," Clinton wrote. "But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb."
Without noting the incident directly, it appears Clinton was referencing allegations that President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence after leaving office in 2021. Trump was charged with numerous federal counts, only to have those charges dropped as he prepared to reenter the White House.
Clinton also took issue with numerous other initiatives by President Trump, including reducing staff within Health and Human Services and cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and USAID.
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She criticized President Trump's efforts to work with Russian President Vladimir Putin on a peace agreement in Ukraine, claiming that Trump is "cozying up to dictators."
"I don’t want to pretend that any of this is easy or that American foreign policy hasn’t been plagued by mistakes," Clinton wrote. "Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them."
The full essay is on the New York Times' website.
