MAGA world had a drastically different response to the Trump administration’s Signalgate controversy compared to the Hillary Clinton email controversy.
“We’re going to get a special prosecutor and we’re going to look into it because, you know what, people have been, their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you’ve done and it’s a disgrace,” Donald Trump had said about Clinton’s email controversy.
“You have to learn from every experience,” Trump said about his administration’s Signal group chat leak fiasco. “I think it was very unfair the way they attacked Michael [Waltz]. He’s a good person.”
“Any security professional, military, government or otherwise, would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct,” current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at the time of the Clinton email controversy.
“Even one hiccup causes a problem,” Hegseth had said.
“This is a guy that pedals in garbage. This is what he does,” Hegseth said on Tuesday about Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of chief of The Atlantic, who was accidentally added to the administration’s “Houthi PC Small Group” Signal chat about organizing strikes on Yemen and then reported on it.
“I’ve heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans,” Hegseth said, denying the severity of the story.
“If she was given special treatment and treated with kid gloves because she’s a Clinton, that is a serious implication,” the now-Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said previously about Clinton’s emails.
“There was no classified material sent on that thread. I don’t think anyone should have lost their job over that, because an errant number, you know, found its way onto a dialogue between leaders,” Johnson said this week about the Signal controversy.
“It was prosecutorial discretion there. They didn’t prosecute. They didn’t go after these folks in all of these other instances, but in the one, you go after President Trump?” the now-National Security Advisor Mike Waltz had pondered prior about Clinton’s emails in comparison to the judicial treatment of Trump.
In response to the Signal controversy, a group chat he started, he said the journalist’s number somehow got “sucked in” to his phone.
“There is no question she violated State Department rules, and the question is, had she exposed us through this use of a personal emails and the personal security server to any kind of problem internationally?” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro had passionately questioned about Clinton’s email controversy.
But regarding Signalgate, she said, “We’re seeing transparency in a way that is, I think people should be comforted by.”
“She lied and lied and lied again and again about the email server,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said previously about Clinton. “Just the mishandling and destruction of classified information — they’re both crimes.”
But about Signalgate, the conservative television personality said, “Of course, it’s not acceptable for a reporter from The Atlantic to be accidentally included in a group policy discussion at the White House, but this was a one-off. This was an accident, not a nationwide crisis.”
