2025-04-15 21:27:40 by Wired

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 “calculated strategy” by Trump administration officials to evade transparency laws through the illegal destruction of government records.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 “SignalGate” scandal. American Oversight, a watchdog organization whose attorneys are suing the government, claim the declarations reveal “troubling inconsistencies” 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.“Using encrypted, disappearing messages on Signal for official government business violates the Federal Records Act and represents a calculated strategy to undermine transparency and accountability,” claims the group’s interim executive director, Chioma Chukwu.The use of the private group chat—in which some messages were configured to automatically delete before they could be archived—was first revealed by The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on March 24, after he was inadvertently added to the group by Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. American Oversight subsequently filed Freedom of Information Act requests over the chats and then sought a temporary restraining order in a Washington, DC, federal court in an effort to compel the government to salvage any messages yet to be deleted.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.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.The declarations filed by the government late Monday show a scattershot attempt by multiple agencies to comply with the court’s demands, with several days elapsing during their various individual efforts to obtain and preserve the messages.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. “We were really trying to seek preservation of Signal chats more broadly,” American Oversight’s deputy chief counsel, Katie Anthony, tells WIRED. “But the court was not willing to step outside the one specific chat we all knew about for certain."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—alleged to cover five days in early March—might 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.The US Treasury Department was initially alone 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’s chief of staff. The messages begin at 1:48 pm EST on March 15, 2025."The Atlantic article was about a chat that took place the 11th through the 15th,” Anthony says, “so pretty much everything was gone—from the only defendant who gave us clear and specific information about what they were able to save.”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’s communications team had been asked to forward the Signal messages to an official DOD account. Pressed by the court for further details last week, the DOD said Monday 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.American Oversight’s lawyers had urged the court to seek greater specificity, arguing on April 4 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 had been started by Waltz’s team with a slew of cabinet officials.“It 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,” Anthony says.The Department of Justice, meanwhile, opposed the court’s 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” 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 “partial version of the chat” had already been committed to a federal record keeping system, it said, by “at least one agency.”Among other new details, Monday’s disclosures provided a range of dates for the preservation efforts at multiple agencies, including the date that Hegseth’s phone was finally “searched.”Screenshots of chats on Marco Rubio's phone were likewise captured on March 27, the State Department said. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said its screenshots were taken the following day, on March 28. The CIA said it took a screenshot of the chat on March 31; 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 “substantive messages.”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.“This attack on government transparency threatens the very foundation of our democracy,” Chukwu says. “And we are committed to using every legal tool available to expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable.”