Hillary Clinton sparked immediate backlash after she weighed in on the Trump administration’s leaked war plans. Clinton expressed her shock after Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally included in a group chat with Donald Trump’s entire defense team strategizing about a military attack on Yemen. ‘You have got to be kidding me,’ the Former Secretary of State posted on X, alongside the large eyes emoji. Clinton’s cheeky dig fell flat, with many online pointing out how she lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump amid concerns over her use of a private server to store top-secret government documents. ‘Welcome to the “Maybe Sit This One Out” Hall of Fame,’ Review Columnist Christian Schneider wrote.

‘Lady, when someone you hate is hanging themselves, it’s best to stand back and watch, not shift the focus back to yourself and your own misdeeds,’ Liz Mair, a former Libertarian communications director, suggested. Michael J Morrison, a member of the New York Young Republicans, also said he is ‘old enough to remember when you used a server in your basement and nothing happened to you.’ The scandal broke out ahead of the 2016 presidential election between Clinton and Trump. An FBI probe found that Clinton stored tens of thousands of emails from her time at the State Department on several different, unsecured private servers – including seven email chains discussing classified material deemed to be at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level.

In total, the investigators uncovered 113 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified information. But then-FBI Director James Comey declared that while Clinton was ‘extremely careless’ in her use of the private email server, the agency would not recommend criminal charges. Amid backlash, he announced he was reopening the investigation at the end of October – which Democrats blamed for Clinton’s loss in the election. Meanwhile, many who are now in the Trump administration called Clinton out for the apparent security breach, with Trump himself leading calls of ‘lock her up!’ at his rallies. Now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio also blasted Clinton in a Fox News interview in 2015, saying: ‘The exposure of sensitive information to foreign intelligence agencies by communicating an insecure manner is incompetence, it is malpractice, it’s inexcusable.’

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz – who was the one who inadvertently invited Goldberg to the Signal group chat – was even still criticizing Clinton for her email scandal as recently as 2023. ‘Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account,’ he posted on X at the time. ‘And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing.’ Those Trump advisors are now facing their own backlash as Goldberg shared how he find himself in a group chat with Waltz, Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and even Vice President JD Vance. A CIA representative, Trump adviser Stephen Miller and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles were also listed in the group.

Goldberg said that ‘Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m.’ The bombs started dropping in Yemen around 2pm. The journalist then returned to the group chat were he found a flurry of emojis and congratulations flying throughout the text chain. Waltz responded with three emoji, he noted: a fist, an American flag, and fire. The National Security Council has since confirmed the chat – entitled ‘Houthi PC small group’ – is authentic. In an interview with CNN on Monday night , Goldberg revealed that the chat included ‘attack plans,’ locations and identities of targets and the ‘sequence’ of strikes against the Houthis.

He also said he was fascinated by Vance’s thoughts, breaking with Trump and also questioning his knowledge on the subject. ‘I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices,’ Vance wrote. ‘There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.’ ‘He’s basically just told the entire cabinet that he disagrees with the president’s decision and not only that, that he doesn’t think the president understands,’ Goldberg told CNN. ‘That’s pretty heavy, he doesn’t think the president understands the consequences and ramifications. That was very revealing and interesting,’ he added.

The journalist also revealed that nobody in the group chat seemed to ever question his place in it, nor did they contact him when he left it. ‘It’s a level of incuriosity, I guess that’s the nice way of saying it, a level of recklessness that I have not seen in many years of national security reporting,’ Goldberg said. Trump said on Monday that he hadn’t seen The Atlantic story: ‘I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic. It’s to me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business.’ When pressed about the Signal chat, Trump said: ‘It couldn’t have been very effective, because the attack was very effective. I can tell you that I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time.’ The president had ordered the strikes against the Iran-backed rebels in Yemen as a warning to Tehran. The Houthi rebels were targeting ships on the Red Sea from countries with ties to Israel, including the U.S. and UK.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, though, adamantly denied that he was ‘texting war plans’ to a group chat about military strikes in Yemen that a journalist was accidentally added on to. ‘Nobody was texting war plans and that’s all I have to say about that,’ he told reporters after a flight to Hawaii, before he lashed out at Goldberg for its reporting. ‘So you are talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes, time and time again.’ He cited various stories The Atlantic has run on Trump’s alleged connections to Russia, his ‘very fine people’ comments after the Charlottesville riots being taken out of context and the alleged ‘suckers and losers’ comments on soldiers killed in war. ‘This is a guy who peddles in garbage. This is what he does,’ Hegseth added.

But in his interview with CNN, Goldberg claimed Hegseth was not telling the truth. ‘No, that’s a lie. He was texting war plans, he was texting attack plans,’ the editor asserted. ‘When targets were gonna be targeted, how they were gonna be targeted, who was at the targets, when the next sequence of attacks were happening,’ he said. Goldberg added that there was more he didn’t publish ‘because it was too consequential, too technical and I worry that sharing that information in public could be harmful to American military personnel.’ It now remains unclear whether there will be any fallout from the scandal, as Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared that it ‘represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen.’ ‘Military operations need to be handled with utmost discretion, using approved, secure lines of communication, because American lives are on the line. ‘The carelessness shown by President Trump’s cabinet is stunning and dangerous,’ he added. ‘I will be seeking answers from the Administration immediately.’

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