Hillary Clinton Secret Server vs Waltz Signal

You're not bright if you don't realize this apples and oranges

By Chuck Warren

By now, you probably have seen the Signal controversy. A -gate it is not.

Of course, every left-wing journalist is comparing this with the Hillary Clinton server story. Well, maybe compare is the wrong word because they are not actually putting facts next to each other. But since they are not being intellectually honest (shocker), let me.

If you grab your phone right now, you either already have Signal on it, or you can download it in under a minute.

Now, if you open your closet, you will find your clothes there—a few neckties, pants, shirts, dresses, etc. What you will not find is your private server because most Americans don’t have a server in their houses. But almost every American has at some point added the wrong person to a group chat. Is it as harmless as when the national security adviser does it, No. But it’s much closer to that than when the secretary of state has her own private server and keeps using it. And Hillary Clinton did it for nefarious purposes.

Second, when the story came out, the White House made a statement acknowledging it. When the Clinton story broke, she bleached the server to cover it up.

Third, Mike Waltz was trying to schedule a meeting, and this was a one-time thing. Clinton used her private server for everything for many years, not just once.

This is important. Waltz didn’t mean to add Jeffrey Goldberg. It was a mistake. You could not possibly say that Clinton accidentally was using her private server for all the thousands of emails she sent over many years, and that she was not aware that she was doing this.

Last, there is also no coverup going on. The Clinton story was not just about the careless handling of classified information but also about the aftermath coverup. There is no coverup going on here.

Now, the left-wing media are trying to hype up the story by talking about “war plans.” I agree that they should not have had this conversation on Signal—which was not Waltz’s intention anyway, as he was just trying to set up a meeting. But if you read the text messages, you will find such basic military stuff on Wikipedia. They are not war plans. And it’s the Houthis. The media are acting as though we tipped off the Nazis before Normandy.

Again, I am not saying that using Signal was good, but you could let the Houthis know where and how you are going to hit them, and they still couldn’t do anything about it. At all times, we know where their commanders are, where the weapons are, and what the targets are. And if they move, we will know where they are as they change location.

It’s not that they are a superpower so that they could close the Red Sea; it’s because Biden was a wuss and feckless president who was too scared of a bunch of losers carrying AK-47s to attack them.

The “war plans” they are talking about are about where we were going to hit them and that we were going to use sequential bombing instead of bunker busters. It is not like if the Houthis found out about this, they could rebuild their weapons silos to make them immune to sequential bombing within a couple of days.

But what if this whole plan were leaked and it was every bit of a disaster that these journalists say it could have been? What could that look like?

Oh right, like Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. Except that we didn’t use any boots on the ground in Yemen, and Houthis couldn’t hit our aircraft or ships. But the terrorists killed 13 U.S. servicemembers and wounded another 45.

Their whole case against this is that it could look like Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, but also, you should have supported Biden (and then Kamala Harris) against Trump because Trump is so careless that he could lead us into a military disaster like Afghanistan? This is circular logic from partisan hacks.

Now, if you are someone who was outraged by the Afghanistan withdrawal and is criticizing this, you have credibility. But most of these journalists lost that credibility four years ago when Biden decided to end the war in Afghanistan without a plan because he wanted to give a speech to congratulate himself on 9/11’s 20^th anniversary and got our boys killed along the way.

The second issue I have with this is how people keep saying, “SCOOP!” A scoop is when some insider intentionally lets a reporter into some secret to get the story out.

This was not intentional or deliberate. It was an accident. There’s no scoop. But journalists keep saying “scoop” because they all suffer from main character syndrome: They need to find a way to make this about themselves and journalism.

Waltz should not have used Signal. But the fact that he used it does not make him Hillary Clinton.

The real value of this whole episode is reminding us what a wreck Biden was as the commander-in-chief, that he could neither start a war with Houthis nor end one against the Taliban.

Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.