Thirteen Previously Unreported Signal Chats Tie Hegseth, Rubio, Vance, and Caine to Auto-Delete Function After Signalgate

What the FOIA Records Show

The State Department released records last week showing 13 Signal group chats involving top Trump administration officials that had not been previously reported. The release came in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation filed by Democracy Forward, which has filed more than 400 legal actions against the Trump administration since January 2025, according to The Atlantic, which reviewed the records.

The chat names alone are notable. One is labeled "Iran/Ukraine Planning." Another is called "State USAID." A third is titled "SS/APNSA,SD,CJCS" using the acronyms for Secretary of State/Acting Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

That last chat included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine. According to a screenshot from Rubio's phone reviewed by The Atlantic, Caine administered the group and it was set to auto-delete messages after eight hours.

A second chat with 17 participants, including Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, was set to delete messages after one week. A third chat with a participant listed only as "TB" also had auto-delete enabled.

Joe Holstead, a spokesperson for Caine, told The Atlantic that the chairman uses Signal only "for administrative and coordinating matters within the parameters of DoD Instructions concerning online information and records management" and does NOT use it to share classified information.

Activity Continued After Trump Said to Stop

The original Signalgate scandal broke in late March 2025, when The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported he had been accidentally added to a Signal group chat in which Hegseth shared operational details about a March 15 airstrike on Houthi rebels in Yemen, including F-18 launch timing, drone arrival windows, and strike sequencing.

On April 24, 2025, Trump told Goldberg directly in the Oval Office: "I think we learned: Maybe don't use Signal, okay? If you want to know the truth. I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal."

Ten days later, according to The Atlantic, then-Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone was texting Rubio and Rubio's then-counselor Mike Needham on a Signal group labeled "MMM." Records show that chat had been active since at least April 15, nine days before Trump's own interview.

The Records Law Problem

The Federal Records Act requires federal officials to preserve communications related to official government business. Agencies are supposed to ensure retention by forwarding messages to official systems or capturing them another way.

Auto-delete functions on Signal make that compliance harder to verify and harder to audit. Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, sent a letter to the National Archives and Records Administration on Monday calling the three auto-delete chats a "likely violation" of federal record-preservation laws and urging NARA to initiate an enforcement action.

Nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight filed a separate lawsuit in March 2025 targeting Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Rubio for alleged violations of the Federal Records Act and Administrative Procedure Act. American Oversight Interim Executive Director Chioma Chukwu called the original Signalgate disclosure "a five-alarm fire for government accountability and potentially a crime."

No charges have been filed against any official as of June 30, 2026, and no criminal investigation has been publicly announced.

The Inspector General's Finding

In a separate track, the Pentagon's inspector general concluded, in a report previewed in early December 2025, that Hegseth improperly used Signal to convey sensitive information in a way that put a U.S. military operation at risk, according to Al Jazeera and reporting from The Associated Press cited within that coverage. The report recommended greater operational security training.

Critically, the IG declined to rule on whether the specific information Hegseth transmitted was classified at the time. The IG noted that as Secretary of Defense, Hegseth holds authority to make that determination himself. That carve-out has drawn criticism from government accountability groups but is a genuine legal complexity, not just a convenient escape hatch.

The Strongest Defense of the Officials

The administration's defenders have a real point. Signal is widely used by government and military officials precisely because it is end-to-end encrypted and far more secure than standard SMS or email. Using it for coordination and administrative matters, as Caine's spokesperson described, is not inherently illegal. The line the law draws is whether records of official business were preserved elsewhere, not whether Signal was used at all. If agencies captured these communications through a separate logging or forwarding system, no law was broken. The FOIA records released so far are screenshots, which suggests at least some content was retained. What remains genuinely unknown is whether the auto-deleted messages, the ones that are no longer recoverable from the app, were captured by any other means.

What Happens Next

Much of the content in the 13 chats remains redacted, leaving the substantive discussions unknown. Democracy Forward's letter to NARA requesting an enforcement action is on the record as of this week. Whether NARA acts and whether its response would be auditable is the open question that will determine whether the Federal Records Act has any practical teeth here.