According to Hillary Clinton, it’s the stupidity, stupid.
The former first lady and erstwhile secretary of state faced political attacks from then-candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 election over using a home server to view government emails.
Clinton said the Trump administration carelessly handling sensitive information is not her main concern of the Signal scandal.
“It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity,” Clinton wrote in an op-ed published March 28 in The New York Times.
“We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already,” Clinton wrote, alluding to both the current scandal and the 40 felony federal counts Trump was charged with for allegedly mishandling classified information. Those charges were dropped after Trump was elected to a second term in November.
“What’s much worse,” Clinton wrote, “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.”
The op-ed was the first time Clinton addressed the Signal scandal in detail. When The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg broke the story on March 24, Clinton tweeted, “You have got to be kidding me.”
“This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security,” the former secretary of state claimed, referencing the Department of Government Efficiency inadvertently terminating government employees who work with America’s nuclear arsenal and the administration’s canceling of aid to combat the Ebola virus in Africa, among other policies.
Clinton went on to attack Trump’s foreign policy as “dumb power.”
“In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone,” she wrote.
“The Trump approach is dumb power. 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.”
She claimed the efforts by Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who purportedly gave a blow-by-blow account of US airstrikes in Yemen in the Signal chat viewed by a journalist, to rid the military of diversity, equity and inclusion is a distraction.
“Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb,” Clinton wrote.
While the administration’s goal of ridding the federal government of waste, fraud and abuse is a noble one, Clinton said Trump’s “slash-and-burn approach” is not effective.
“All of this is both dumb and dangerous,” she said.
A YouGov survey released March 26 comparing the Clinton and Trump scandals found American voters view the Signal controversy as more serious.
Nearly 75% of US adults believe the Trump scandal is “very” or “somewhat” serious, the found, with 53% in the “very serious” camp and 21% viewing the scandal as “somewhat serious.”
While a majority of US adults believed Clinton using a private email server from home was “very” or “somewhat” serious, the margins were far slimmer compared to the Trump scandal.
When the Clinton scandal was polled by YouGov in 2015, 30% of American adults viewed it as “very serious” and 26% said it was “somewhat serious.”
By 2022, Americans grew more concerned over Clinton’s emails, with 41% describing the matter as “very serious” and 21% labeling it “somewhat serious.”
One of the chief concerns about Clinton’s email server was that it was insecure, and that sensitive information could fall into the wrong hands. But former FBI Director James Comey said in recommending that no charges be brought against Clinton that there was no evidence that her email account had been hacked by hostile actors.
—Howard Koplowitz, al.com (TNS)
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