Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard defended the Trump administration’s use of Signal while also taking aim at Biden-era officials for doing exactly the same in an interview Friday.
“Limited use of end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal is not only authorized under this administration, it was used prolifically under the Biden administration as well,” Gabbard said on Fox & Friends.
She added the platform remains “the most secure form of communication” provided it’s not used “to communicate classified information” before going on to claim she had been “told by people who have first-hand experience” that Biden administration officials like former National Security Adviser and ex-Secretary of State Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken “communicated prolifically and in great detail using the Signal app.”
“Which is interesting,” she went on. “Because the Democrats on the committee and the people who’ve been talking about this have never questioned or acknowledged that fact, even though we know that they know.”
Her comments come hot on the heels of a raft of embarrassing Signal-related leaks and blunders over the past few weeks.
The so-called “Signalgate” scandal first broke last month after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a group chat on the messaging platform in which 17 top members of the Trump administration—including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Gabbard herself—shared highly sensitive details of imminent missile strikes against Yemen.
In the weeks since, it has also emerged that Hegseth communicated further details of those plans to his lawyer, brother, and wife via another secret group chat on the app, in addition to having bypassed Pentagon security protocols to install the messaging platform on his office computer.
“It’s just practical,” Gabbard said of the White House’s continued use of the app. “We have to be able to communicate, and that is the most secure way to communicate. Obviously, carefully, limited, but we have to have options.”
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