In a 2016 appearance on Fox News, the future defense secretary Pete Hegseth repeatedly criticized presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for using a private server for her work as the Obama administration’s secretary of state.
“If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now,” Hegseth said.
As a Fox News on-air analyst, Hegseth made a lot of comments that year as Clinton’s use of a private server became a Republican campaign issue, stirred up a public controversy and sparked an FBI investigation: “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,” Hegseth said.
“The fact that she wouldn’t be held accountable for this, I think, blows the mind of anyone who’s held our nation’s secrets dear,” Hegseth added back in 2016, “and who’s had a top-secret clearance like I have and others who know that even one hiccup causes a problem.”
Now, Defense Secretary Hegseth and other top Trump administration officials are embroiled in a controversy that brings to mind the drama around Clinton nine years ago.
In a breach that some national security experts called unprecedented and extraordinarily grave, Hegseth and other members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet were found to be discussing operational war plans about how and when to attack the Iranian-sponsored Houthi militias in Yemen earlier this month. And they appear to have accidentally invited a prominent journalist, The Atlantic magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to their Signal chat – which he wrote about in a bombshell article published Monday and confirmed by the White House.
But Hegseth wasn’t alone.
Virtually every other person on the “Houthi PC small group” chat on Signal, including the heads of the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, have publicly gone on record to say breaches of security protocol should be dealt with harshly and immediately.
‘Nobody is above the law’
Here’s Trump Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then the junior Republican senator from Florida, who happened to be running for president when the Clinton controversy broke in 2016: “Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton,” Rubio told Fox News at the time. “Even though she thinks she is.”