Hypocrisy Much? Hillary Clinton Calls Out Trump Admin for SignalGate Despite Her Past Controversies

Hillary Clinton has entered the chat. 

As the media continues to obsess over the fallout from SignalGate, the former secretary of state decided to weigh in on the security breach via an op-ed in The New York Times.

She did not mince words in her criticism of the “dumb” Trump administration for, among other things, adding Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal group discussing U.S. strikes against Houthi terrorists in Yemen. And she also seems blissfully unaware of just how hypocritical the critique is given her own history jeopardizing classified information with her private email server.

On Friday’s show, Megyn was joined by Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine, hosts of 2Way’s The Morning Meeting, to discuss the op-ed and why Clinton wrote it despite her past.

The Hypocritical Op-Ed

In an op-ed titled “How Much Dumber Will This Get?”, Clinton unironically called the SignalGate controversy dangerous and “dumb.” 

“It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws,” she wrote. “What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.”

Clinton’s criticism of the Trump team’s handling of sensitive information comes despite the fact that her own handling of sensitive information during her time as secretary of state was a key issue in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign she lost to Trump. She was found to have sent emails from a private server while working at the State Department. “I mean, this is so rich given her history, but we knew that already,” Megyn said. “This is her just trying to say, ‘I did nothing wrong, and my whole controversy was made up.'”

But her hypocritical blows didn’t end there. Clinton also took aim at the firing of federal workers, the shuttering of USAID, and the state of global diplomacy, calling the moves “dumb power.”

“As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might, and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone together. They make America a superpower,” she wrote. “The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.”

Megyn said Clinton was likely referring, at least in part, to Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine. “She was secretary of state when we went over there. To say we meddled in their election is to understate where we are today as a result of that meddling… for which she takes no responsibility,” she explained. “She just talks about how smart she was in the way she manipulated the world and how dumb Trump is when he is now, again, having to clean up a massive, Democrat-fueled… mess that has cost countless numbers of lives.”

And then there was the part where Clinton slammed Trump for de-emphasizing the importance of embassies, to which Megyn had but one question. “Would she touch anything having to do with an embassy or a diplomatic facility after Benghazi,” she asked.

During Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, a September 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty.

Imperfect Messenger

Given her history, Megyn said Clinton was not the right person to chime in on this story. “I really think Hillary Clinton should have sat this one out. She is in no position to throw stones,” she noted. “She should have had Bill write it. She should have had some friend of hers on Team Blue write it – someone other than the person with this brand of problems.”

Halperin joked that it took a lot of “chutzpah” for Clinton to put pen to paper on this one, but he understands why she did. “You can hear her voice in that thing. There may have been some ghost writing help, but that is her. She has the rare honor, along with Kamala Harris, of losing presidential elections to Donald Trump, and she will never get over it,” he explained. “And I understand why you’re saying she shouldn’t have been the one to write it, but it’s a pretty good enunciation of the view of tens of millions of people about what’s going on, and… both Clintons just love the national town square. They don’t want to be away from it. 

Turrentine said he is one of those “tens of millions” of people Halperin mentioned. “I actually loved it. I will fully admit… she may not be necessarily the best messenger… but she is throwing punches,” he said. “I think the party has sat around frozen since Trump got elected… They don’t know what to do… and I think she is just like, ‘We need to stand up and start saying stuff, and I’ll do it.'”

While Democrats like Turrentine might appreciate one of their own getting off the sidelines, Spicer said there is just too much baggage with Clinton. “It is just embarrassing how clueless and how un-self aware she is of her own vulnerabilities,” he said. “When she does stuff like this, it means the Democrats have to answer for it. We get to talk about it.”

He had a suggestion for the failed presidential hopeful. “This is one where you literally say, ‘I’ll write it for you’ and then hand it off to somebody else,” Spicer concluded. “Or put it on your unclassified server and keep it for yourself.”

You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Halperin, Spicer, and Turrentine by tuning in to episode 1,037 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.