The op-ed in The New York Times called the Signalgate controversy dangerous and “dumb.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has an assessment of her one-time presidential rival’s administration’s handling of sensitive information: “It’s just dumb.”
Clinton — who faced off against Donald Trump for the presidency in 2016 — lambasted the Signal group chat that revealed plans for the recent strike in Yemen as dangerous and “dumb.”
“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,” she wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. “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.”
Trump focused on Clinton’s handling of sensitive information in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign — the infamous emails that she sent from a private server while working in the State Department. He threatened investigations and prosecution throughout his first term, and many of the officials involved in the Signal thread had sharply criticized Clinton in the past. The Trump administration has blasted Clinton’s emails more aggressively in the wake of Signalgate, arguing that they were a bigger breach.
Clinton’s critique of Trump’s second term went beyond just the Signal scandal, laying into the administration over the mass firing of federal workers, the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the retreat from global diplomacy, arguing it was weakening the country on the world stage.
“The Trump approach is dumb power,” she wrote. “Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.”
Though they faced off years ago, Trump has moved in the last few months to get retribution against his perceived enemies, stripping security clearances and targeting Clinton’s former lawyer as part of his crackdown on Big Law.
But Clinton’s take on Friday homed in on the looming threat of China filling in where U.S. diplomats have retreated, arguing that “forward-deployed diplomacy” is essential to America’s global standing.
“If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us,” Clinton wrote.
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