{"id":845062,"date":"2025-05-01T17:11:57","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T22:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/01\/heres-what-happened-to-those-signalgate-messages\/"},"modified":"2025-05-01T17:11:57","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T22:11:57","slug":"heres-what-happened-to-those-signalgate-messages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/01\/heres-what-happened-to-those-signalgate-messages\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s What Happened to Those SignalGate Messages"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages<\/a> to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege that new court filings by the government reveal a \u201ccalculated strategy\u201d by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.<\/p>\n

US defense and intelligence agencies on Monday submitted supplemental declarations in court outlining their individual efforts to preserve the messages at the center of the \u201cSignalGate\u201d scandal<\/a>. American Oversight, a watchdog organization whose attorneys are suing the government, claim the declarations reveal \u201ctroubling inconsistencies\u201d in efforts by US officials to archive the material, with the Central Intelligence Agency in particular alleging that it had archived no messages of any substance.<\/p>\n

\u201cUsing encrypted, disappearing messages on Signal for official government business violates the Federal Records Act and represents a calculated strategy to undermine transparency and accountability,\u201d claims the group\u2019s interim executive director, Chioma Chukwu.<\/p>\n

The use of the private group chat\u2014in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived\u2014was first revealed by The Atlantic\u2019s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on March 24<\/a>, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump\u2019s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order<\/a> in a Washington, DC, federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.<\/p>\n

In addition to Waltz, known participants in the chat group include, among others, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.<\/p>\n

WIRED has requested comment from the Justice Department, the Office of the National Intelligence Director, and the White House. The departments of Defense and State declined to comment. The CIA could not be immediately reached for comment.<\/p>\n

The declarations filed by the government late Monday show a scattershot attempt by multiple agencies to comply with the court\u2019s demands, with several days elapsing during their various individual efforts to obtain and preserve the messages.<\/p>\n

Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, issued his initial order to preserve the communications on March 27, while giving each agency four days to describe what actions were being taken to obey. \u201cWe were really trying to seek preservation of Signal chats more broadly,\u201d American Oversight\u2019s deputy chief counsel, Katie Anthony, tells WIRED. \u201cBut the court was not willing to step outside the one specific chat we all knew about for certain.”<\/p>\n

The declarations ultimately offered scant information about the methods that were employed to preserve the messages or the degrees to which those methods are forensically sound. And it is unclear from the disclosures what portion of the chat\u2014alleged to cover five days in early March\u2014might have been irretrievable by that time. According to reporting by The Atlantic, some of the messages concerning the military strikes, which targeted Houthi fighters in Yemen, were set to delete automatically after four weeks. Others were reportedly set to disappear after only one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The US Treasury Department was initially alone<\/a> in providing the court a timeline of the messages that it was able to retrieve. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had received a preservation memo on March 26, his acting general counsel said, as well as advice regarding his fundamental duty to preserve records. Resultingly, “images were taken from the phones of Secretary Bessent and Mr. [Daniel] Katz,” Bessent\u2019s chief of staff. The messages begin at 1:48 pm EST on March 15, 2025.<\/p>\n

“The Atlantic article was about a chat that took place the 11th through the 15th,\u201d Anthony says, \u201cso pretty much everything was gone\u2014from the only defendant who gave us clear and specific information about what they were able to save.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Department of Defense told the court last month that its attorneys were “in the process” of complying with the agency’s preservation rules and that Secretary Hegseth\u2019s communications team had been asked to forward<\/a> the Signal messages to an official DOD account. Pressed by the court for further details last week, the DOD said Monday<\/a> that a search of Hegseth’s device had been conducted “on or about March 27,” adding that screenshots of the “existing Signal application messages” had been preserved.<\/p>\n

American Oversight\u2019s lawyers had urged the court to seek greater specificity, arguing on April 4<\/a> that “vague, incomplete assertions” in the government’s original declarations had only cast fresh doubts on its “purported efforts” to preserve the chats. In light of new reporting, the group argued, the government’s response seemed otherwise “grossly inadequate.” Politico had reported two days prior that as many as 20 private Signal chat groups<\/a> had been started by Waltz\u2019s team with a slew of cabinet officials.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems very likely that the individuals who are defendants in our lawsuit are probably involved in some of those other chats, and we have this problem on a much wider basis,\u201d Anthony says.<\/p>\n

The Department of Justice, meanwhile, opposed the court\u2019s involvement, arguing that its efforts on behalf of a watchdog group were legally confused and that the question of whether any laws were broken is in any case moot. Members of the public, it argued, have no “enforceable rights\u201d when it comes to challenging the destruction of specific government records. A court order was unnecessary, the department said, because the government was already taking steps to do what is required. A \u201cpartial version of the chat\u201d had already been committed to a federal record keeping system, it said, by \u201cat least one agency.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among other new details, Monday\u2019s disclosures provided a range of dates for the preservation efforts at multiple agencies, including the date that Hegseth\u2019s phone was finally \u201csearched.\u201d<\/p>\n

Screenshots of chats on Marco Rubio’s phone were likewise captured on March 27<\/a>, the State Department said. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said its screenshots were taken the following day, on March 28<\/a>. The CIA said it took a screenshot of the chat on March 31<\/a>; however, it also clarified one of its previous declarations to the court, revealing that the image shows mainly the name of the chat group and some of its members and settings but not any of its \u201csubstantive messages.\u201d<\/p>\n

American Oversight previewed a case to amend its initial complaint during a hearing last week, with plans to encourage the court to expand the scope of its review to include the now-reported widespread use of Signal by top officials across the national security state.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis attack on government transparency threatens the very foundation of our democracy,\u201d Chukwu says. \u201cAnd we are committed to using every legal tool available to expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Dell Cameron
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Attorneys suing the United States government over its use of vanishing Signal messages to coordinate military strikes last month in Yemen allege that new court filings by the government reveal a \u201ccalculated strategy\u201d by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records. US defense and intelligence agencies on Monday<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":845063,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[649,211],"tags":[10134,5521],"class_list":["post-845062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-happened","category-heres","tag-happened","tag-heres"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=845062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/845063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}