‘You Have Got to be Kidding Me’—Hillary Clinton’s Perfect Clapback After Trump Official’s War Plans Leak

When it was revealed that top officials in Donald Trump’s administration had been talking about secret national security matters in a group chat, Hillary Clinton didn’t hold back. She responded with a sharp comment and added a side-eye emoji, writing, “You have got to be kidding me.”

The group chat took place on Signal, a private messaging app that makes money from its services. Among those involved in the chat were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. According to The Atlantic magazine, the officials were openly discussing very sensitive military plans—things that are usually kept highly confidential. The strange twist? The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, accidentally ended up in the group chat and witnessed the whole thing.

This situation is especially ironic for Hillary Clinton. Back in 2016, during her run for president, she was heavily criticized for using a private email server while she was Secretary of State. Some of the same people now involved in this recent Signal chat scandal were the ones who had attacked her the most back then.

At the time, the FBI investigated Clinton’s emails and found that while she had been “extremely careless,” she hadn’t broken any laws. Still, her opponents made it a huge political issue.

One of those critics was Marco Rubio, who said on Fox News in 2015 that sharing classified information in an unsafe way was “incompetence,” “malpractice,” and “inexcusable.”

Mike Waltz, who was the person that invited Jeffrey Goldberg into the Signal chat by mistake, was still criticizing Clinton about her emails as recently as 2023. He posted on X (formerly Twitter), accusing Biden’s national security advisor of emailing Clinton’s private server and claiming the Justice Department ignored it.

Donald Trump himself repeatedly said Clinton should go to jail for her emails, and crowds at his rallies would chant “Lock her up!”

Just eleven days before the 2016 election, then-FBI Director James Comey reopened the investigation into Clinton’s emails. Even though it was closed again just two days before the vote with no charges filed, Clinton believes the timing of that investigation played a major role in her losing the election.

Now, with Trump officials having these serious security discussions in a casual Signal chat, the tables have turned. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, what they did could actually be against the law. He explained that discussions about military plans should happen only in very secure areas called SCIFs (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities)—places specifically designed to prevent leaks.

Despite this, Pete Hegseth, one of the people in the chat, seemed convinced everything was fine. While Goldberg was still in the group, Hegseth messaged that everything was “clean on OPSEC,” meaning he believed they were following proper security procedures—even though they clearly weren’t.