Just hours after the public learned about the “Signalgate” scandal, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered floor remarks and said, “This kind of carelessness is how people get killed. It is how our enemies take advantage of us. It is how our national security falls into danger.”
In the next breath, the New York Democrat added, “If you were up in arms over unsecure emails years ago, you should certainly be outraged by this amateurish behavior.”
It’s no great mystery as to what the senator was referring to. NBC News reported:
A decade ago this month, America found out that Hillary Clinton used a private email server to communicate while serving as secretary of state — and later that a handful of the messages had classified markings. … Now, two months into Trump’s second presidency, the top officials in his administration were discussing sensitive military operations using a commercial, encrypted cellphone app called Signal, The Atlantic reported Monday.
This did not escape the attention of the former secretary of state. “You have got to be kidding me,” Clinton wrote online in response to the bombshell report.
The response is understandable. Many of the same people who went after her in years past, accusing Clinton of using a private platform to discuss sensitive national security matters, were far more careless with their recent use of Signal.
Younger readers might not fully appreciate the degree to which the 2016 presidential election focused on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email protocols. Voters were told in no uncertain terms that this was one of the defining political issues of our time.
As Election Day 2016 approached and the U.S. was facing the prospect of electing a television personality to the nation’s highest office, “email” was the one thing voters heard most about the more capable and more qualified candidate.
That Clinton did not rely entirely on her state.gov address, the electorate was told, was evidence of her recklessness. She put the United States at risk, the argument went, by mishandling classified materials. For some, it might even have been literally criminal — culminating in “Lock her up” chants at Trump rallies.
During the presidential campaign, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan went so far as to formally request that Clinton be denied intelligence briefings, insisting that her email practices were proof she mishandled classified information and therefore couldn’t be trusted.
When various observers (including me) said this was an outrageously foolish controversy, we received pushback from those who argued with great sincerity that this deserved to be an issue that dictated the outcome of one of the most important national elections in modern history.
Clinton, of course, narrowly lost to Trump, who was later credibly accused by federal prosecutors of improperly taking classified materials to his glorified country club in Florida, before relying on the kind of private email servers that sparked the anti-Clinton hysteria. Years later, as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump explained, the reporting in The Atlantic highlighted a Republican White House that demonstrated “an indifference to security that is more obvious and more immediate than anything Clinton was ever accused of doing, with a demonstrable failure to preserve the security of the operation.” I’ve seen some suggestions over the last day or so that Republicans conveniently flip-flopped, taking the issue seriously during the Clinton era, only to reverse course during the Trump era. There’s something to this, of course, but such an assessment is ultimately incomplete. It’s not that Trump, his team and his party have changed their minds about the importance of tech security. The truth is simpler: They never actually cared about Clinton’s tech practices in the first place. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
