Friday, March 28, 2025

Jim Jordan, where are you now?

Does anyone remember Jim Jordan serving on the House Select Committee on Benghazi? During what seemed like weeks of hearings, in which he and his GOP colleagues tried to blame Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the deaths of  United States Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith, Jordan lambasted Clinton for sending email on her private email server that should have been deemed classified at the time they were sent, including 65 emails deemed "Secret" and 22 deemed "Top Secret". 

(As an aside, Jordan and Gowdy's efforts to keep the matter in the public eye, and James Comey's decision to reopen the investigation which he has previously closed were likely significant contributors to Trump's election victory in  2016).   

Nine years on we have what appears to be an far more more egregious lapse in security.  Peter Hegseth, Trump's (utterly unqualified) Secretary of Defense used a group chat on the Signal platform to circulate information about an impending US military strike on Houthi terrorist leaders in Yemen.  

While the chat never explicitly labeled the details as 'war plans'", Hegseth's claim that this wasn’t a disclosure of 'war plans'—despite listing targets, timing, and tactics—is laughable; and that he couldn't come up with a better defense speaks volumes in and of itself.   

So where is Jim Jordan, defender of our national security and the rules on classified information that we need to keep our operational military personal safe and our military interventions effective?  Clinton endured eleven hours of televised questioning and a months-long FBI probe. Where's Jordan on Hegseth's screw-up?  Is he calling for an FBI probe, public hearings, resignation? Of course not; he's complete silent!  His grandstanding was never about national security.  It was always about scoring political points.  

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