When Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were confronted with intensive control of their handling of classified material, top officials who now served in the Ministry of Justice of Trump and FBI criminal probes and serious fines.
Yet today, those same figures – including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, and DC interim US Attorney Ed Martin – have all declined to publicly criticize senior Trump officials who used Signal to share military attack plans in a chat That inadvertently included a journalist.
The Trump administration has denied that classified information was discussed in the SMS messages that the Atlantic Ocean released about plans to bomb rebels in Yemen, but CNN reported that information shared in the chat was strongly classified when it was sent.
Bondi, now the highest ranking of the country of law enforcement, defended the civil servants who participated in the Signalchat, including vice -president JD Vance and Minister of Defense Pete Hegseeth, and suggested that it was unlikely that their actions would be investigated criminally. But earlier, Bondi claimed that both Clinton and her assistant Huma Abedin should be confronted after e-mails containing classified information were found on the computer of her ex-husband, former Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner.
“This has everything to do with the safety of our country,” Bondi said at Fox News in January 2018. “If you have the best secret security authorization that Huma Abedin had tweet you when you send those e-mails that you are breaking the law, and there is no objective law enforcement officer in this country who would not charge her. Okay? Nobody.”
Bondi has repeatedly prepared the Clinton e-mail examination as a clear legal issue in its performances on FOX News, assessed by CNN's Kfile and said that “we live in a nation of laws” and that Clinton “endangered our national security”.
On Thursday, Bondi defended the officials in the Signaal chat and said that the chat contained 'sensitive information, not classified'.
“What we should talk about is that it was a very successful mission,” she said reporters. “If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton, the classified documents in the garage of Joe Biden.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said that Bondi's public comments 'speak for themselves' last week.
Likewise, Patel has previously called for hard prison sentences for leaking classified information.
“A leak of classified information – that is a federal crime that is being punished by, I think, more than ten years in prison, of my head,” Patel said in 2021 when discussing leaks to the media during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. “It is a pretty serious matter.
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In another interview in September 2024, Patel criticized the decision of special counselor Robert Hur not to accuse Biden for alleged classified documents.
“They left the man of the hook,” he said about Biden, who was examined for classified documents found in his private residence in Delaware. “They just said it doesn't matter … You have invented a new legal standard that applies to free it and not even charge it.”
Bongino, a former agent of the Secret Service and now the second-in-command of the FBI, often accused the Democrats and the Biden administration of incorrectly classified information and the use of coded apps to prevent accountability, including the app signal.
“This was a travesty of justice, there is no other way to look at it,” said Bongino with regard to the recommendation of former FBI director James Comey to not accuse Hillary Clinton in 2016. “And I worked as a federal agent as a federal agent for 12 years of my life and as a local police officer.
“What Jim Comey explained yesterday that what Mrs Clinton did for 15 minutes – in the federal system, you can provide information in a complaint or a complaint. If that went before a judge and jury, he would have only been convicted of that information on that information.”
Since then, tweets also has been aiming for Abedin and he wondered whether former FBI Adjunct director Andrew McCabe possibly used unsecured communication to process classified information.
“Either Huma knew that she sent classified e -mails to Weiner, and did this illegally, that is why she committed a crime. Or Huma did not know that sending classified E -mails was a crime and had absolutely no things to gain access to the Clinton Political Machine & Insiders in our GOVT,” ” he said in a deleted tweet from the end of 2017.
In one Tweet in February 2018 Bongino wrote: “Here is the next shoe to drop -> was Andy McCabe with Secure Comms to send/receive classified information? Someone should check that.” McCabe, a long -term target of Bongino, was part of the FBI research into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
Patel and Bongino have not publicly criticized the officials involved in the signal chat. The FBI refused to comment on CNN.
Ed Martin, now the acting American lawyer for the District of Columbia and the official who would supervise every prosecution with regard to the Signal Chat, has previously adopted a hard attitude in the treatment of classified material.
“When he took them, he could have done nothing but violated the law, the period,” said Martin in his radio show in 2023, referring to Biden's possession of classified documents.
In a tweet in 2018, Martin wrote that 'almost everyone' who leaked classified information would 'go to prison'. And in 2024 he asked: “Was it not a crime for a vice -president to remove top secret and classified documents from the White House and to store them unsecured in his garage …? If that is not the case.”
Martin has not publicly commented on whether the Signal chat justifies investigation.
A spokesperson for the office of the American lawyers for the District or Columbia refused to comment on CNN.
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