CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s smartphone has almost no trace left of the infamous Signalgate chat – the one in which he and other top US national security officials discussed a secret upcoming military operation in a group Signal conversation a journalist was inadvertently added to.
That’s according to the spy agency’s own chief data officer Hurley Blankenship, who was tasked with preserving the group chat on his boss’s phone after a judge demanded the messages be retained.
Non-profit American Oversight had asked James Boasberg, Washington DC’s chief federal district judge, to make that order as part of its lawsuit against those officials as well as the government: The independent watchdog claims Team Trump broke federal record-keeping rules by discussing military plans on the app and setting at least some of the messages to auto-delete.
For that lawsuit, Blankenship testified [PDF] that when he came to take a copy of the group chat on Director Ratcliffe’s phone, following the judge’s retention order, the only remnant of the Signalgate chatter was the group name and some administrative info, such as members’ profile names. Almost all the rest of the data, including the content of the messages, was missing.
Blankenship told the court what he was able to screenshot on Director Ratcliffe’s device on March 31 “does not include substantive messages from the Signal chat.”
Security fiasco
The Signalgate group came to light when The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly included in the March 11 discussion. The highly sensitive chat session discussed forthcoming, unannounced military airstrikes in Yemen in the hours before they occurred, including which aircraft and drones were to be used, the targets, and the name of a serving CIA officer involved in the operation.
In screenshots of the chat the ed-in-chief published after the White House tried to argue the plans he saw in the app were not classified, it is clear various messages were set to disappear after varying lengths of time, such as one week. In the 20 days between the chatter and Blankenship attempting to taking copies of the data, the thread had gone, we’re told.
“These revelations confirm our fears,” said Chioma Chukwu, interim Executive Director of American Oversight, in light of the testimony.
“The Trump administration appears to be systematically and illegally destroying evidence to hide its actions from the American people.
“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 despite the grave risk it poses to our national security and the safety of our men and women in uniform.
“This attack on government transparency threatens the very foundation of our democracy, and we are committed to using every legal tool available to expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable.”
Judge Boasberg’s retention order, dated March 27, covered a number of government departments and agencies, as participants on the call included the US Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller, and US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, who inadvertently included the journo in the group.
Those other bodies didn’t wait until March 31 like the CIA did to take a copy of the chat, according to evidentiary statements [PDF] filed by American Oversight. A State Department official testified that images of the thread were taken on March 27, as did the Department of Defense. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the Signal messages had been kept, but didn’t specify when the devices in question were inspected.
Another interesting snippet from Blankenship’s testimony is that the conversation was carried out using Director Ratcliffe’s personal Signal account. Signal hasn’t been officially certified as safe for the transmission of classified information. Some bigwigs in the Trump regime don’t seem to care too much about that sort of things: Waltz reportedly used his personal Gmail account to share sensitive info as well.
The CIA had no comment at the time of going to press. ®