National Security adviser Mike Waltz speaks as he sits with President Donald Trump during an Ambassador Meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on March 25. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
National security adviser Mike Waltz’s team regularly set up chats on Signal to coordinate official work on issues including Ukraine, China, Gaza, Middle East policy, Africa and Europe, according to four people who have been personally added to Signal chats.
Two of the people said they were in or have direct knowledge of at least 20 such chats. All four said they saw instances of sensitive information being discussed.
It’s a more extensive use of the app than previously reported and sheds new light on how commonly the Trump administration’s national security team relies on Signal, a publicly available messaging app, to conduct its work.
“It was commonplace to stand up chats on any given national security topic,” said one of the people involved in the chats, adding that the groups often included Cabinet members and high-level staff.
All four of the people were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the private chats.
Veteran national security officials have warned the practice potentially violates regulations on protecting sensitive national security information from foreign adversaries, and federal recordkeeping laws if the chats are automatically deleted.
NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes noted that Signal is allowed on government devices and that some agencies automatically install it on employees’ phones. He also stressed that officials have used the app in both the Biden and Trump administrations.
“It is one of the approved methods of communicating but is not the primary or even secondary, it is one of a host of approved methods for unclassified material with the understanding that a user must preserve the record,” Hughes said. “Any claim of use for classified information is 100 percent untrue.”
None of the four individuals said they were aware of whether any classified information was shared, but all said that posts in group chats did include sensitive details of national security work.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported on the existence of an NSC Signal group chats beyond the one on Yemen that The Atlantic first reported on. These latest revelations show that the NSC’s reliance on Signal is widespread and part of standard operations.
“Waltz built the entire NSC communications process on Signal,” said another one of the people who participated in multiple group chats.
Waltz’s use of Signal to coordinate the work of the NSC has come under intense public scrutiny after he accidentally included a journalist on the Signal group text about military strikes in Yemen, sparking a firestorm of political backlash and calls for Trump to force Waltz out of his job.
Waltz and incoming NSC staff first started using Signal prolifically during the transition period before the inauguration and never stopped, according to another one of the four people who participated in the chats.
“This is a bunch of folks who have never been here before and couldn’t switch from campaign mode,” said a fifth person, a former Trump administration official.
Since the Signal chats emerged, Waltz and his staff have also come under fire for using personal Gmail accounts for government communication, as reported by The Washington Post. The NSC confirmed that Waltz and his staff used Gmail accounts but insisted it was to comply with federal records retention and Waltz never sent classified information over any unsecured platform.
Much of the uproar over the Yemen chat group has been about sensitive operational details that were shared. In the Yemen group chat, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth messaged Waltz and other Cabinet officials military strike plans and attack sequences of U.S. airstrikes against Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen. Experts and even some current officials have said that the details that Hegseth shared were likely classified, though the White House has sought to downplay the sensitivity of the information shared.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee sent letters Tuesday to multiple members of the “Houthi PC small group” Signal chat, including requesting that they appear before Congress for transcribed interviews as part of their investigation into potential security breaches from the use of Signal.
Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, the top Democrat on the Oversight committee, wrote in the letters that the Signal group chat “raises immediate and deeply alarming concerns about the misuse of unsecured communication platforms” and “the reckless dissemination of potentially classified material.”
