Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who disclosed the war plans in the chat this month, condemned Mrs. Clinton’s actions during a
Fox News segment in November 2016.
“Any security professional — military, government or otherwise — would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information,” he said.
Mr. Hegseth was also adamant that anyone engaging in similar acts should be summarily punished.
“People have gone to jail for one one-hundredth of what, even one one-thousandth of what Hillary Clinton did,” he said during a Fox Business segment that same month.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, another participant in the encrypted group chat, also voiced those sentiments in a
Fox News appearance in 2016, when he was running for president.
“People are going to be held accountable if they broke the laws of this country,” he said. He added that “nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton.”
Several Defense Department officials said on Monday that by putting U.S. war plans into a commercial chat app, Mr. Hegseth risked compromising national security — and had potentially violated the Espionage Act, a law that governs how national security information is handled.
But members of the group chat still pointed to Mrs. Clinton’s use of the private email server years later as they denounced the Justice Department for
indicting President Trump in 2023 over his handling of classified documents.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/20/travel/things-to-do-Hilo.html
“How is it Hillary Clinton can delete 33,000 government emails on a private server yet President Trump gets indicted for having documents he could declassify?” Michael Waltz wrote on his
Twitter account in 2023, when he was a representative from Florida.