Well, the cognitive gymnastics are about to kick into overdrive as the “lock her up” crowd try to distinguish what happened with Trump’s national security advisors “Signal” chat from Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server are going to be fun to watch.

So what happened with the Signal chat? 

​A few weeks ago, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, found himself inadvertently added to a Signal group chat involving senior U.S. government officials, which was discussing  a planned attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. The attack occurred on March 24, 2025, when U.S. airstrikes targeted sites across the country, in retaliation for Houthi attacks on shipping lanes.

This group included Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. The addition of Goldberg to the chat was apparently an error by Waltz, and it went unnoticed as the officials continued their discussions.

Goldberg initially thought that he was being pranked.

The conversations within the group chat involved detailed plans for the imminent airstrikes, including information on targets, weaponry, and attack sequencing. This breach became public  when Goldberg published an article revealing the incident on the same day that the attacks occurred, after they occurred .

The revelation has understandably raised concerns about the handling of classified information. Legal experts have pointed out potential violations of the U.S. Espionage Act and record retention laws. 

Now I love the Signal App. My family has been using it since WhatsApp was gobbled up by Meta (the company behind Facebook) and some family members decided that WhatsApp could no longer be trusted. We especially use Signal with our relatives in Germany.

Still, I’m not sure I would put family secrets on Signal, never mind national security secrets.

Now all the “lock  her up” Yahoos have to find a good reason why this remarkable breach can be excused when Hillary’s behavior could not.

Let’s remind ourselves what was actually involved with the private email server.

This happened back in the period where Hillary was U.S. Secretary of State under Obama (between 2009 and 2013). Facebook (2004) and YouTube (2005) had just been invented. In other words, the early days of popular Internet use and people were less familiar with how technology worked. Hillary decided to use a private email server (located at her home in Chappaqua, New York) because of convenience (so she could use a single device for both personal and work emails) and maybe also because she didn’t trust the government not to leak her emails. In particular:

• The issue surfaced during a House investigation into the 2012 Benghazi attack, when the State Department realized it did not have records of Clinton’s emails.
• In 2014, the State Department requested work-related emails. Clinton’s team reviewed about 60,000 emails and submitted 30,000 to the government, while deleting the rest, claiming they were personal.
• The FBI launched an investigation, which did not result in a recommendation of criminal charges, but which noted 110 emails (of the 30,000 submitted) contained classified information at the time they were sent or received (or 0.366%).
• There is no confirmed evidence that Hillary Clinton’s private email server was ever successfully hacked or breached, or that any foreign entity was even aware of its existence (a Romanian hacker known as “Guccifer” claimed to have hacked Clinton’s server, but the FBI found no evidence to support his claim).

And on that basis conservatives basically lost their minds.

Clinton also arguably lost the election when Comey reopened the query days before the 2016 election because of an unrelated investigation involving former Congressman Anthony Weiner, during which agents discovered emails between his wife, Huma Abedin (a close aide to Clinton), and Clinton on Weiner’s laptop. (The Justice Department’s internal watchdog later concluded that Comey made a “serious error of judgment” in making this announcement so close to the election.)

And now, conservatives will be doing cognitive cartwheels to claim that this remarkable breach involving detailed attack plans on a Signal chat that was distributed to a journalist (!) is not a significant breach. 

Boy, their heads must hurt at night.