Pete Hegseth's Carelessness and Dishonesty Mirror Hillary Clinton's
The defense secretary, who shared information about imminent U.S. air strikes in a manifestly insecure group chat, thought Clinton should be prosecuted for her careless handling of sensitive information.
In downplaying the gravity of disclosing details about an imminent U.S. military operation to participants in a Signal group chat that included an accidentally invited journalist, President Donald Trump and his underlings have insisted the information was not classified. "You all know that's a lie," Rep. Joaquin Castro (D–Texas) told CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, at a hearing on Wednesday. "It's a lie to the country."
Or is it? It was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who divulged information about the impending air strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. The New York Times notes that "the president and the secretary of defense have the ability to assert, even retroactively, that information is declassified." When a similar issue came up in connection with the government records that Trump kept after leaving the White House in 2021, he said the president—and presumably the defense secretary too—can declassify stuff just "by thinking about it."
That argument was a red herring because the main statute Trump was accused of violating, 18 USC 793, covers information "relating to the national defense," regardless of whether it is officially classified. And since that law encompasses "gross negligence" as well as willful dissemination of national defense information, Hegseth arguably violated it by using a forum that was manifestly insecure to discuss the timing and nature of the March 15 operation in Yemen before it happened.
As a Fox News talking head in 2016, Hegseth alluded to the "gross negligence" provision, Section 793(f), in arguing that Hillary Clinton, then Trump's opponent in that year's presidential election, should be held criminally liable for using a private email server as secretary of state, thereby carelessly exposing sensitive information. "Any security professional…would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information," Hegseth declared. "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, who's had a top-secret clearance, like I have and others [have], who know[s] that even one hiccup causes a problem, let alone a standard procedure like this."
Section 793(f) applies to anyone "entrusted with" national defense information who "through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust." Hegseth was right that Clinton's carelessness seemed to fit the elements of that offense, which is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
James Comey, then director of the FBI, conceded as much even as he explained why did not think Clinton should be prosecuted. "In our system of law, there's a thing called mens rea," Comey told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in July 2016. "We don't want to put people in jail unless we prove that they knew they were doing something they shouldn't do. That is the characteristic of all the prosecutions involving mishandling of classified information." He said he was able to locate just one case prosecuted under Section 793(f) in the century since the law was passed, which he thought showed federal prosecutors "have grave concerns about whether it's appropriate to prosecute somebody for gross negligence."
The Trump supporters who chanted "lock her up" had no such qualms, and neither did Hegseth. And although he faulted Clinton for a "standard practice" that was "reckless," he also suggested that "even one hiccup" might justify prosecution because it "causes a problem."
It is fair to note that Clinton's security lapses, unlike Hegseth's, were part of a persistent pattern. At the same time, Hegseth's carelessness seems like more than a "hiccup."
Half an hour before U.S. planes took off on March 15, Hegseth provided a "TEAM UPDATE" to the Signal chat group. It included information about the aircraft ("F-18s"), their launch time ("1215et"), the beginning of the "'Trigger Based' F-18 1st Strike Window" ("1345"), and a "Strike Drones Launch" involving "MQ-9s." Hegseth noted that "Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location," meaning the first strike "SHOULD BE ON TIME." He added that a "2nd strike" involving "more F-18s" would launch at 2:10 p.m. ET and that "Strike Drones" would be "on Target" five minutes later, which was "WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier 'Trigger Based' targets." He said the second F-18 strike would start at 2:36 p.m. ET, which was also when the "first sea-based Tomahawks" would be launched.
Classified or not, this was definitely information "relating to the national defense" that could have compromised the operation if it had fallen into the wrong hands. While Signal messages are encrypted in transit, the app resides on hackable cellphones, which is why critics question Hegseth's decision to use it for such a sensitive conversation. Ordinarily, such discussions would be limited to "sensitive compartmented information facilities" (SCIFs), which are less convenient but more secure.
Worse, we know about this incident only because National Security Adviser Michael Waltz (or someone in his office) accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, in the group chat. Although Hegseth was not responsible for that baffling boner, Goldberg and his Atlantic colleague Shane Harris note, "the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg's cellphone." If Hegseth's text "had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds," they write. "The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic." The Houthis have Iranian-supplied surface-to-air missiles that could be used to shoot down U.S. aircraft.
That certainly looks like "gross negligence." At the very least, it does not make Hegseth seem like someone who holds "our nation's secrets dear." His carelessness was not as persistent as Clinton's, but it involved information that posed a specific and concrete threat to U.S. military personnel.
After Goldberg first revealed the Signal conversation on Monday, Hegseth implied that the story was much ado about nothing. "Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that," he told reporters, dismissing Goldberg as a "so-called journalist." Although that defense seemed untenable after Goldberg reported the details of what Hegseth had said in the Signal chat, the White House is sticking with it.
"The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT 'war plans,'" press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an X post on Wednesday morning. "This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin."
Hegseth himself doubled down on X a few hours later: "The Atlantic released the so-called 'war plans' and those 'plans' include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information. Those are some really shitty war plans. This only proves one thing: Jeff Goldberg has never seen a war plan or an 'attack plan' (as he now calls it). Not even close….We will continue to do our job, while the media does what it does best: peddle hoaxes."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio conceded that including Goldberg in the group chat was "a big mistake," saying "reforms and changes" may be necessary to avoid such errors in the future. But he concurred that "there were no war plans on there" because Hegseth's message omitted many of the details that such plans would include.
This semantic quibbling elides the point that Hegseth carelessly shared national defense information in a context where it could have caused real harm, which was the essence of his complaint about Clinton. His slippery response to that charge is also reminiscent of the Clinton email scandal.
"I'm not making excuses," Clinton said at a rally in October 2016. "I've said it was a mistake and I regret it."
Contrary to the implication that Clinton had been forthcoming all along, she did not manage to describe what Comey later called her "extremely careless" handling of "very sensitive, highly classified information" as a mistake until six months after The New York Times revealed her reliance on a personal email system during her tenure at the State Department. Until that interview, she did nothing but make excuses, and even afterward she continued to offer false assurances aimed at minimizing her misbehavior.
Clinton claimed that "what I did was allowed," that she "fully complied with every rule," that "there is no classified material" in the emails she sent and received, and that she "went above and beyond what I was requested to do." She also said she "opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two."
As investigations by the State Department's inspector general and the FBI later showed, none of that was true. Clinton did not comply with every rule, she did not turn over all her work-related emails to the State Department or do so in a timely fashion, the emails did include classified material, her use of a private account was contrary to State Department policy, and she carried multiple devices despite saying she sought to avoid them.
Notwithstanding these manifest misrepresentations, Clinton falsely claimed Comey had verified the truthfulness of her public statements about the email controversy when he said he did not have any basis to charge her with lying to the FBI. Then she said that whopper was based on a misunderstanding, which clearly was not true. In other words, she lied about lying about her lies.
So far, Hegseth has not managed to achieve that level of meta-deception. But he is off to a good start.
