President Trump drew a simple lesson after his top national security advisers accidentally texted war plans to The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, last year. “I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?” he told Goldberg and others in the Oval Office on April 24, more than a month later. “If you want to know the truth. I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal.”
But Trump’s top advisers did not heed his advice. Ten days after that interview with the president, his then–special envoy for Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone, was texting on Signal with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Rubio’s then-counselor, Mike Needham, in a group chat labeled “MMM.” The men had been conversing on the app since as early as April 15, when Claver-Carone reached out to Rubio and Needham.
The State Department last week released records from the exchange, found on the phones of Rubio and Needham, in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation by Democracy Forward, which has filed more than 400 legal actions against the Trump administration since last January. The new release, which we reviewed, includes 13 Signal chats from the first six months of 2025 that have not been previously reported. The new records are screenshots of Signal groups that mostly lack context about when they were formed and what was discussed. The identities of nearly all of the group members are visible, revealing even broader use of Signal by top Trump-administration officials than was previously known. The names of the groups are also telling, including one called “Iran/Ukraine Planning” and another labeled “State USAID.”
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The records raise the possibility that top administration officials failed to follow federal laws that require the preservation of government records. A screenshot from Rubio’s phone shows that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine was the administrator of a Signal group with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Rubio that was set to automatically delete messages after eight hours, prompting questions about whether the communications were retained another way. The group was named “SS/APNSA,SD,CJCS,” using the acronyms for the three men’s titles; Rubio added the role of acting assistant to the president for national security affairs to his secretary-of-state duties on May 1, 2025, weeks after The Atlantic’s reporting drew attention to the administration’s use of Signal. Joe Holstead, a spokesperson for Caine, told us in a statement that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs “uses the Signal app for administrative and coordinating matters within the parameters of DoD Instructions concerning online information and records management.” Caine does not use the app to share classified information, Holstead said.
Another chat with 17 participants—including Hegseth, Vice President Vance, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—had deletion set to one week, as did a third chat with a person labeled “TB.” Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, described these three chats as “likely violations” of the Federal Records Act in a letter sent today to the National Archives and Records Administration. “Given that numerous agency heads are personally implicated in these likely FRA violations, your action to initiate an enforcement action is critical,” she wrote.
The State Department did not immediately provide a comment for this story. The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly referred to the records as “old news” and told us in a statement: “As we have said, Signal is an approved app that is pre-loaded on government phones.”
With open-source code and no cost to download, Signal is regarded as perhaps the most secure messaging app on the public market, as long as users are careful about who they invite to conversations or allow to access their devices. The platform has end-to-end encryption that prevents even the nonprofit that maintains its servers from gaining access to messages, and an easy-to-use auto-delete function.
Although the app is not approved for communicating classified information, current and former officials have told us that they still routinely use Signal for other matters because government-approved devices for sharing encrypted information are less efficient. Many senior officials are issued secure government cellphones that can be used for classified calls and, in some cases, email—but, as of early last year, not text messages, one former senior Biden-administration official told us. The most senior officials—the president, Cabinet members, and top military officials—have SCIFs installed in their homes and travel with teams that can set up secure communications.
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Trump-administration officials have defended such use of the app. “Signal is an approved app that is loaded onto our government phones,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted on social media on May 1, 2025, after former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz—who was the administrator of the March 15 Signal chat that included Goldberg—was photographed using a Signal-like application offered by the company TeleMessage, which was used to archive messages. The company’s systems were reportedly later breached by hackers.
Last June, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg ordered Rubio, who was then the acting archivist of the United States, to seek the recovery of any records that were at risk of deletion because of government use of messaging apps, as part of litigation over the handling of the deletion of original Signal messages sent to Goldberg’s phone. Government attorneys had refused to state in court that all records transmitted over Signal had been retained, leading Boasberg to conclude that it was likely that improper deletions could be proved in a full trial. After Boasberg’s order, Trump-administration officials told the court that they had installed new software on government phones to ensure document retention.
The redactions in the 13 new chats released from the phones of Rubio and Needham, who now serves as deputy national security adviser under Rubio, did not indicate that any information was withheld on the grounds that it concerned defense, intelligence, or foreign policy, which is exempt under the Freedom of Information Act. The redactions were made to protect deliberative processes, attorney-client privilege or attorney work product or are protected for personal privacy reasons, according to the documents. That doesn’t mean, however, that the information in the chats wasn’t sensitive or potentially revealing. The screengrabs also do not rule out the possibility that other chats in the new batch of releases had been set to auto-delete at an earlier point in time.
State Department lawyers redacted the names of four Signal group chats on Rubio’s or Needham’s phones, and the names of two participants in a seven-member chat administered by Michael Anton, then the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning office, on the grounds that they contained “personal privacy information.” It’s possible that the names refer to lower-level employees who are not decision makers like the more senior officials in the thread, but the government offered no further explanation for why it wouldn’t reveal the names. It’s not obvious what the chat was about, because the group name was also redacted.
One of the unnamed groups released from Rubio’s phone brought together 17 officials, similar to the group that was included on the chat called “Houthi PC small group” that erroneously included Goldberg. The unnamed group had the same participants, with some notable exceptions such as the absence of then–National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. Lutnick and someone labeled “A P” were included, despite their lack of involvement in the Houthi chat. The group “Iran/Ukraine Planning” included Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, and “State USAID” included Needham and Rubio.
The most recent documents were released last Monday in response to Democracy Forward’s March 26, 2025, Freedom of Information Act request for group names, deletion timelines, and participants for all Signal conversations that Rubio and Neeham used for official business. Further heavily redacted details from the “MMM” chat were released last November in response to a request for correspondence on messaging platforms on those phones discussing a number of immigration-related keywords, such as Alien Enemies Act, Tren de Aragua, and CECOT, a Salvadoran prison that the Trump administration used for some deportations.
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The initial document request led to litigation last year before U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, who expressed concern about the possibility that some records had been deleted in violation of the federal record-preservation laws. Those laws require that officials preserve their communications even when using nongovernmental messaging platforms, which they can do by copying their official email account if using a private email platform or by forwarding messages to official accounts within 20 days.
The State Department told the court on July 22, 2025, that “Secretary Rubio does not use the auto-delete functions in third party messaging applications when sending communications that may include federal records.” By that point, the State Department had installed commercial software made by LeapXpert on some senior officials’ government-issued phones to capture records of chats on Signal, even if a sender has configured a message to automatically delete, a State Department official wrote in a declaration to the court. The company bills itself as turning Signal into a “government-grade communication channel” by helping organizations comply with federal record-keeping laws. A spokesperson for LeapXpert declined to comment on its work for the government.
At an August 28 hearing last year, a lawyer for the State Department told Mehta that the department could not say whether responsive messages had been automatically deleted from prior Signal chats. “State is not in a position to make a representation on that,” the Justice Department attorney Amber Richer told the court. Caine, who was not a participant in the original Houthi-related chain that included Goldberg, testified before the Senate on April 1, 2025, that he “always communicated proper information in the proper channels.” When Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a Democrat, asked him what he would do if he saw classified information on an unclassified group chat, he said, “I would weigh in and stop it if I was a part of it.”
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