Because Clinton’s recklessness ensured that so many Republicans are on record objecting to her conduct, the GOP knows precisely what questions to ask.

Revisionist narratives pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s “homebrew” email server have left us with one of two hazy recollections from that all-consuming scandal. The first, which is preferred by Democratic partisans, maintains that it was a fracas over nothing – a sham summed up in the dismissive retort, “But her emails.” Republicans and their allies remember it as a product of Clinton’s entitlement, a likely criminal enterprise that the Justice Department only passed on prosecuting in deference to political concerns. The appearance of system-wide corruption not only handed Donald Trump the presidency but legitimized his critique of the crookedness to which establishmentarian politics had succumbed.

In short, we’re more likely to remember the political narratives because the political narratives are more valuable to political actors. But Clinton’s conduct raised serious procedural concerns as well.

By the spring of 2016, it was already public knowledge that Clinton’s email server was not adequately encrypted until weeks after she was sworn in to serve as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. That was bad enough. But as the Washington Post’s Stewart Baker speculated at the time, this was probably no oversight. “There now seems to be a very real probability that Hillary Clinton rushed to install an encryption certificate in March 2009 because the U.S. intelligence community caught another country reading Clinton’s unencrypted messages during her February 16–21, 2009, trip to China, Indonesia, Japan, and S. Korea,” he wrote.

Along with her server, Clinton retained the unsecured mobile device to which it was linked. A State Department memo indirectly admonished Clinton for clinging to her Blackberry, warning that “the vulnerabilities and risks” of using private mobile devices “outweigh their convenience.” The event that precipitated the intervention appeared to Baker to include concerns about the prospect that Clinton’s use of a non-government cellphone overseas could have provided foreign intelligence services with access to sensitive government communications.

“I am 99 percent sure her phone was compromised,” said one encryption expert at the time, a prospect former FBI Director James Comey could not rule out. “Political leaders should be operating and communicating on approved and secured systems at all times, period,” said former Navy Seal and cyber security expert Vic Hyder.

That brings us to the cascade of disturbing revelations that continue to emanate from The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s inexplicable inclusion in a Signal app thread in which ranking Trump officials discussed in advance the timing, sequencing, and scale of a recent strike on the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

One of the participants included on that thread was real estate developer and Trump’s all-purpose conflict negotiator, Steve Witkoff. “Signal cannot be used on federal phones,” Politico noted, “raising the question of which devices Cabinet members were using.” Some speculated that Witkoff might have exposed that thread to Russian intelligence because he was in Moscow at the time when the conversation occurred. In a statement, though, Witkoff explained that he did not have access to the Signal thread because he did not have access to his personal mobile device. “I only had with me a secure phone provided by the government for special circumstances when you travel to regions where you do not want your devices compromised,” he wrote.

That’s reassuring. But as Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov observed, that suggests Witkoff “did participate in that group on a personal device.” That is a troubling implication. It raises questions about the other participants on that thread. Were all participants in that conversation using approved computers pre-loaded with Signal (despite the Pentagon’s concerns over its vulnerabilities)? Were none of them on the move at the time? Who else in the administration could be skirting records-keeping laws and protocols designed to keep classified information from escaping the secure, compartmentalized facilities in which it is supposed to be contained?

Another aspect of the Clinton saga that has achieved new relevance as a result of the Signal leaks is about what constitutes a classified document. In testimony before Congress, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard repeatedly testified that no information that could be considered classified was shared on that text thread. When that obviously classified information was released by The Atlantic on Wednesday, Gabbard clarified that she did not recall the details of that text chain. But Gabbard should not need to have her memory jogged to understand that what was discussed – the specific timing of the strikes, the ordnance and platforms used, the targets selected, and real-time damage assessments – are “born classified.” That, too, is a phrase we should recall from Hillary Clinton’s time in the dock.

“Even if information is not marked ‘classified’ in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,” Comey said at the time. As the George W. Bush White House’s former Information Security Oversight Office director J. William Leonard noted, some information – intergovernmental communications, for instance, or, indeed, active preparations for a military strike – become “classified at the moment it’s in U.S. channels and in U.S. possession.” In short, top secret information doesn’t need to be marked as such for government officials to recognize its sensitivity.

All this is to say that every effort by this administration’s officials to wriggle out of culpability for this objective security lapse raises new questions that demand answers. And because Clinton’s recklessness ensured that so many Republicans are on record objecting (in granular detail) to her conduct, the GOP knows precisely what questions to ask.