Brazen Hypocrisy Enters the Signal Group Chat

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edgar albert guest Essay

By Jill Filipovic

Ms. Filipovic is a journalist, a lawyer and an author.

By now, you’ve heard the story: several of President Trump’s top national security officials used a publicly available nongovernmental messaging app to make plans to bombard Yemen, accidentally added the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine to the group chat and proceeded to share information that seems, to put it mildly, highly sensitive.

Some of the chat’s messages were set to auto-delete in what seems to be a violation of federal records-keeping laws. Watching the saga unfold has been an exercise in shock compounding shock. By the end, it’s hard to figure out what to be most disgusted by: The recklessness? The incompetence? The danger? The use of prayer emojis before weapons were launched?

Add to the list: The mother lode of hypocrisy. After the Trump administration denied that any classified material was shared in the group chat, The Atlantic published the conversation nearly in full, redacting only the name of a C.I.A. Employee. If the story was bad before, it’s now worse. And one thing is clear: In Trumpworld, the rules often — maddeningly — seem to apply only to other people.

The obvious comparison here, already made on repeat, is the Great Hillary Clinton Email Scandal of 2016 (“but her emails!”). As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton ran some of her emails through a personal server, a violation of protocol and a security risk, although one that the State Department later said was minimal. (“There was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information,” was the ultimate conclusion from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security after a three-year investigation.)

Still, the Clinton email story stretched on for well over a year, dominating prime-time cable news segments and newspaper front pages across the nation, including this one. Just days before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. Director at the time, James Comey, announced that his agency was reopening an investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails — and that story again ran on front pages nationwide. The email scandal may have been why Mrs. Clinton lost.

Republicans chanted “Lock Her Up!” and carried signs saying so at their party’s 2016 convention. Pam Bondi, then the attorney general of Florida and now the attorney general of the United States, took the convention stage and said that Mrs. Clinton “believes the laws don’t apply to her” and “deserves no security clearance.” As the crowd broke into their favorite chant, Ms. Bondi joined in. “Lock her up,” she said. “I love that.”

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