FOIA records reveal Hegseth and Rubio kept using Signal chats after Trump urged officials to stop

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio continued using auto-deleting Signal group chats well after President Donald Trump publicly told his team to drop the encrypted app, newly released State Department records show. The documents, pried loose through Freedom of Information Act litigation, reveal 13 previously unreported Signal group chats involving senior administration officials during the first half of 2025.

The records raise fresh questions about whether the administration's own recordkeeping practices square with federal law, and whether Trump's clear directive carried any weight inside his own cabinet.

Trump left little room for interpretation when he addressed reporters in April. "I think we learned: Maybe don't use Signal, okay?" he said. "If you want to know the truth. I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal." Yet the documents released by the State Department last week, in response to a FOIA lawsuit brought by the watchdog group Democracy Forward, show that senior officials kept right on chatting.

Thirteen chats, two deletion timers

Among the most striking details in the released records: a Signal group administered by Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, titled "SS/APNSA,SD,CJCS," that included both Hegseth and Rubio. That chat was configured to automatically delete messages after just eight hours.

A separate group that included Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was set to erase messages after one week. Other newly disclosed chats bore labels like "Iran/Ukraine Planning" and "State USAID", titles that suggest the discussions touched on sensitive policy matters, though the full contents have not been made public.

A conversation among Rubio, former Latin America envoy Mauricio Claver-Carone, and then-counselor Mike Needham continued after Trump's April remarks, the records indicate.

Hegseth has faced sustained scrutiny over his tenure at the Pentagon, including Republican pushback over some of his leadership decisions. The Signal disclosures add another layer to the political pressure surrounding his office.

The White House response

The White House dismissed the records as "old news." Spokesperson Anna Kelly told The Atlantic, "As we have said, Signal is an approved app that is pre-loaded on government phones."

That framing, Signal is approved, so its use is proper, has been the administration's consistent line. A spokesperson for Caine echoed it, stating that the chairman "uses the Signal app for administrative and coordinating matters within the parameters of DoD Instructions concerning online information and records management." The spokesperson added that Caine does not use the platform to share classified information.

But "approved for use on government phones" and "appropriate for auto-deleting discussions about Iran, Ukraine, and military coordination" are two very different claims. The Federal Records Act requires federal agencies to preserve records that document their activities and decisions. An eight-hour deletion timer does not sit easily alongside that obligation.

A legal trail that keeps growing

The Signal controversy did not begin with these records. It traces back to the now-infamous incident in which Atlantic editor Jeffery Goldberg was mistakenly added to a separate Signal group chat where officials discussed military operations against Houthi rebels. That blunder set off a cascade of legal and political consequences that have followed Hegseth for months.

The Pentagon Inspector General launched a formal investigation into whether Hegseth and other DoD personnel violated policies by using a commercial messaging app for official business. Inspector General Steven Stebbins said the evaluation aimed "to determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business." The probe was requested by both Republican and Democratic leaders on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That investigation concluded with a report finding that Hegseth used unsecured devices and messaging services to discuss classified military strike details, including information about F-18 jets, Tomahawk missiles, and MQ-9 drones, in Signal chats, one of which accidentally included Goldberg. Sources cited in the inspector general's findings said the shared information "could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots."

Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the report "a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth," insisting it proved "no classified information was shared." The gap between the IG's documented findings and the Pentagon's characterization of them remains wide.

Meanwhile, Hegseth has pressed forward with an ambitious agenda at the Defense Department, including a sweeping review of the military legal system aimed at refocusing the Pentagon on combat readiness over bureaucratic process.

Courts, archives, and the records question

The legal pressure extends beyond the IG report. Last June, a federal judge ordered Rubio to seek recovery of records at risk of deletion. Administration officials later told the court they had installed software intended to preserve messages sent through Signal, an implicit acknowledgment that the auto-delete settings posed a records problem.

Whether that software was installed before or after the chats revealed in the latest records were active remains unclear. So does the question of whether any of the 13 newly disclosed group chats involved classified information.

Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman has urged the National Archives to initiate an enforcement action over what she called "likely violations" of the Federal Records Act. That characterization is Perryman's, not a legal finding, but the underlying facts she points to are now documented in the government's own FOIA production.

The watchdog group American Oversight has also sued Hegseth and other officials, alleging violations of federal record-keeping laws through their use of Signal to discuss military strike plans. The lawsuits are stacking up.

Democrats have seized on the broader Signal controversy to push for Hegseth's removal, a campaign that legal commentator Jonathan Turley has described as an "unbridled circus" designed to weaponize impeachment proceedings.

The real problem isn't the app

The White House is right about one narrow point: Signal is, in fact, an approved application loaded onto government devices. The issue was never whether officials could have the app on their phones. The issue is what they did with it, and what they set it to destroy.

An eight-hour auto-delete on a chat labeled with the abbreviations for the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not a casual texting preference. It is a deliberate choice about whether records of high-level national security coordination will exist for Congress, inspectors general, courts, or future historians to review.

Conservative voters who sent this administration to Washington did so in part because they were tired of unaccountable government. They watched the previous administration stonewall FOIA requests, hide behind classification, and treat transparency as an inconvenience. The promise was that this team would be different, more accountable, more direct, less captured by the permanent bureaucracy's habits of secrecy.

Auto-deleting chats about Iran and Ukraine do not fulfill that promise. They replicate the old pattern under a new label.

Trump himself seemed to grasp the problem in April when he told his people to stop. The fact that tensions between the president and some of his senior officials have surfaced on other fronts makes the continued Signal use all the more notable. When the boss says stop, and the team keeps going, the question is no longer about technology. It is about discipline.

What remains unanswered

Several important questions hang over the newly released records. The National Archives has not publicly responded to Democracy Forward's request for enforcement action. The specific software installed to preserve Signal messages has not been identified, and its effectiveness has not been independently verified. The full contents of the "Iran/Ukraine Planning" and "State USAID" chats remain undisclosed.

And the most basic question of all: if officials installed preservation software as they told the court, why were auto-delete timers still running on these chats?

The administration can call this old news. But the records are new, the deletion timers were real, and the Federal Records Act does not come with an expiration date.

When your own president tells you to put the phone down and you keep texting, the problem is not the app, it is the assumption that the rules apply to everyone else.