Secretary Scott Bessent turned over his cell phone and had it digitally copied by the Treasury Department on Thursday after he participated in a Signal chat with other high-level government officials about war plans earlier this month.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may end up turning over Signal messages too, according to court documents that describe how the Defense Department is now also moving to preserve records.
New court filings describe the Trump administration’s belated effort to comply with federal records laws. The sudden moves followed the filing of a lawsuit against several of the Signal chat participants by a nonprofit watchdog, American Oversight, which is seeking to ensure that the government doesn’t erase evidence of official activities in the aftermath of Signal-gate. The scandal began earlier this week when The Atlantic published details of how some members of the administration mistakenly included a journalist in a group chat that discussed specific plans to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Department of Justice lawyers are now requesting a federal judge to not intervene in agency recordkeeping — or refer the matter to criminal investigators.
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Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump political adviser Stephen Miller and several other top officials were all part of a short-lived Signal group chat that was started by White House national security adviser Michael Waltz earlier this month. So far, however, the court record only shows that the Defense and Treasury departments have taken specific and immediate steps to preserve the record of their interactions in an electronic conversation where some messages were set to delete.
The top lawyer at the Treasury Department, acting general counsel Christopher Pilkerton, signed a declaration describing how the agency has quickly responded to the situation. Pilkerton said he sent memos to Bessent and the agency head’s chief of staff, Daniel Katz, “instructing them to take any steps necessary to preserve all existing communications” related to official conduct “using any electronic messaging application,” not just Signal.
He went on to describe how “images were taken from the phones of both Secretary Bessent and Mr. Katz of all existing messages from the Signal chat.”
“Imaging” is a computer forensics process that grabs all of the existing information on a device, but it’s unclear how much of this particular Signal conversation can be accurately captured at this point. Screenshots published by The Atlantic, whose editor in chief was the journalist invited into the group chat, show that Waltz initially set messages to disappear after one week, then later reset the self-delete feature to four weeks.
In a separate declaration, a high-ranking military lawyer explained that the Defense Department’s attorneys “requested that a copy of the Signal messages … be forwarded to an official DOD account.” Associate Deputy General Counsel Gerald Dziecichowicz said his office “is in the process of issuing a litigation hold,” which would mean a general order to keep any files from being destroyed.
The official statements were made in the run-up to an afternoon court hearing, where D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg is set to consider issuing a temporary restraining order “to immediately desist from unlawfully destroying federal records in violation of the Federal Records Act.” Judge Boasberg was randomly assigned the case shortly after becoming a political target of President Donald Trump following his attempt — in a separate case — to block the rushed deportation without due process of Venezuelan migrants by plane to El Salvador.
The accusation by American Oversight of improper records retention carries a particular sting for Rubio, who wears two hats as the acting archivist of the United States — a role that oversees the preservation of official records for the public good and future review by historians.
American Oversight has also asked the judge to declare that the deletion of messages “comprises an unlawful removal of federal records” and have the matter turned over for an full investigation to Attorney General Pam Bondi — who has already publicly dismissed the matter as unworthy of a criminal inquiry.
In court filings, DOJ lawyers also tapped what’s becoming a new strategy meant to dampen legal challenges to Trump’s actions: asking for the nonprofit to front cash in the form of a “bond.” Government lawyers reasoned that a temporary restraining order is akin to a full-blown injunction — which is technically a different and more serious form of intervention — then argued that the judge shouldn’t act unless American Oversight posts “an appropriate bond commensurate with the scope of any injunction.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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