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Journalist Sues to Secure Three Months Worth of Hegseth Signal Chat Messages
"And we are bringing this case to make sure that they can't just put national security at risk for their own convenience and then destroy all the evidence afterwards," said the head of the group that filed the lawsuit.
Apr 25, 2025
As the Trump administration faces a metastasizing controversy over reports of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's use of the commercial messaging app Signal, including to discuss U.S. strikes in Yemen, the legal group National Security Counselors on Friday sued on behalf of a journalist to secure three months worth of conversations that took place on the encrypted platform.
According to The Hill, which was first report the news of the lawsuit, the complaint requests Hegseth's Signal messages and the messages from other top Trump officials.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit is journalist Jeffrey Stein, the founding editor of the outlet SpyTalk. Stein sought the three months worth of chat records via Freedom of Information Act request and is now taking legal action to obtain them, according to the complaint, which was filed in federal court.
News about my Signalgate iceberg lawsuit for @spytalker.bsky.social: it's OUT!
[image or embed]
— National Security Counselors 🕵 (@nationalsecuritylaw.org) April 25, 2025 at 12:35 PM
"The heads of at least five of the most powerful agencies in the national security community were freely texting over an app that was not approved for sensitive communications and setting it to automatically delete everything they said," Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, told The Hill. "Since then we've learned that we were right to be worried, thanks to the news about Hegseth's Signal chat with his wife and personal lawyer about bombing plans."
In what's now become known as "Signalgate," The Atlantic revealed last month that its editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been accidentally included in a Signal group chat with top administration officials where they discussed forthcoming U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. The Atlantic later published messages from the chat.
Members of the chat, dubbed "Houthi PC small group," included Hegseth; National Security Adviser Mike Waltz; Vice President JD Vance; CIA Director John Ratcliffe; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The defendants listed in the lawsuit from the National Security Counselors are the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Treasury Department, the CIA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The New York Times reported last week that Hegseth had shared information about impending U.S. strikes in Yemen in another Signal group chat included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer on March 15. The outlet cited four unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter.
In response to the Times' reporting, a spokesperson for the Pentagon wrote on April 20: The the newspaper "relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the secretary and the president's agenda. There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story."
The Times responded a day later saying that it stood by the reporting, that the Pentagon had not denied the existence of the chat, and that the story did not characterize the information in the chat as classified.
In yet another twist, The Associated Press reported Thursday, citing two unnamed sources familiar with the situation, that Hegseth had an internet connection set up in his office at the Pentagon that bypassed government security protocols—also known as a "dirty" line—in order to use Signal on a personal computer.
The AP reported that the advantage of this kind of a line is that a user would be essentially "masked" and not show up as an IP address assigned to the Defense Department, but it would also leave that user vulnerable to hacking.
Speaking of the lawsuit filed by National Security Counselors, McClanahan told The Hill that "this administration has proven again and again that it is allergic to accountability and transparency."
"And we are bringing this case to make sure that they can't just put national security at risk for their own convenience and then destroy all the evidence afterwards," he added.
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Trump Is Copying From the War on Terror Playbook—in CAPS LOCK
The deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past.
Mar 28, 2025
Four years ago, I published Subtle Tools, a book on the erosion of American democratic norms in the face of what came to be known as the Global War on Terror. Both what had been done in the name of “national security” in response to the 9/11 attacks and how it had been done—through the willing neglect of procedural integrity, the exploitation of all-too-flexible norms, a remarkable disregard for transparency, and a failure to call for accountability of any sort—left the country wide open to even more damaging future abuses of the rule of law.
And—lo and behold!—now, that future is all too distinctly here. What happened in the first quarter of this century is already being weaponized in a startling fashion in the second era of Donald Trump. In fact, the deluge of eye-opening, antidemocratic policies that we’ve witnessed in just the first 50 days of his presidency should be considered nothing short of a perverse escalation of the recent past. Think of it, in fact, as—if you don’t mind my inventing a word for this strange moment of ours—the “perversification” of war-on-terror era law and policy, which might once have been hard to imagine in this country.
While there are already all too many examples of that very sort of perversification, let me just focus on several that could prove crucial when it comes to the future of our imperiled democracy.
Racism
Among the numerous anti-democratic trends of this century, state-sponsored racism has been a constant concern. Of the many low points in the response to 9/11, the unleashing of government policies of racial and ethnic discrimination stands out. Fearing a follow-up attack, law enforcement targeted Muslim Americans, surveilling mosques, and casting a startlingly wide net of suspicion with a sweeping disregard for civil liberties. That approach was only strengthened by the militarization of police forces nationwide in the name of targeting Arabs and Muslims. In 2002, the government even introduced the NSEERS program, a “Special Registration” requirement mandating that all males from a list of 24 Arab and Muslim countries (as well as North Korea) register and be fingerprinted. In the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, the program amounted to “a discriminatory policy that ran counter to the fundamental American values of fairness and equal protection.”
A dangerous template for discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin was thereby set in place. In his first term in office, Donald Trump promptly doubled down on that Islamophobic trend, even though his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had revoked the registration requirement. By Executive Order 13769, Trump authorized a ban on the entry into the U.S. of citizens from seven Muslim countries, an order that would be reined in somewhat by the courts and finally revoked by then-President Joe Biden.
The discrimination enshrined by federal authorities in law and policy after 9/11 opened the way for a far more widespread governmental embrace of racial and ethnic discrimination now underway.
Nor, in Trump’s first term, was discrimination limited to those from Arab and Muslim countries. As the Costs of War project has pointed out, the Islamophobia of the war on terror years had set a racial-profiling precedent and example for the more broadly racist policies of the first Trump administration. “The exponential surveillance since 9/11 has also intensified the criminalization of marginalized and racialized groups… and has increasingly targeted protest movements such as Black Lives Matter.” Yes, Trump did indeed go after Black Lives Matter protesters with a vengeance during his first term, even unleashing armed federal agents without insignia to tear gas, beat, and detain such protesters in Portland, Oregon.
While Obama would end the Special Registration program and Biden would revoke the Muslim ban, no preventive measures were undertaken to guard against future racist policies and, all too unfortunately, we see the results of that today.
Trump 2.0 has already escalated discriminatory policies, focusing on protecting white males at the expense of people of color and women. In fact, his very first executive orders included several measures cracking down on asylum-seekers and closing off legal avenues to citizenship, as well as a brazen decree aimed at eradicating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) throughout the country. Executive Order 14173 (“Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”) was issued on January 21, 2025, the very day he took office. It ordered organizations and entities—from government offices and the U.S. military to schools, businesses, and more—to end their DEI policies “within 120 days” or risk losing government funding.
Recently, making good on its threats, the Trump administration canceled $400 million of federal funding in the form of grants and contracts to Columbia University as a sign of disapproval of that university’s supposed tolerance of pro-Palestinian protests, “described,” as National Public Radio reported, “as the school’s failure to police antisemitism on campus.” Nine other universities are believed to be under similar scrutiny.
Meanwhile, according to The New York Times, Trump is planning to issue a new travel ban, including a “red list” of countries whose citizens will be prohibited from entering the United States and an “orange list” of those whose citizens would, in some fashion, be curtailed if not completely barred from entry. As yet, the specifics remain unknown.
In other words, the discrimination enshrined by federal authorities in law and policy after 9/11 opened the way for a far more widespread governmental embrace of racial and ethnic discrimination now underway.
Disappearing the Record
Secrecy was likewise baked into the government’s response to the war on terror, often to keep what would have been obvious abuses of the law well hidden. Whether it was the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”—the phrase employed by the administration of former President George W. Bush for acts of straightforward torture—or mass surveillance, the authorization for the targeted killing of an American citizen, or the implementation of other policies that deviated from accepted law and practice, all of that and more was initially kept well hidden from the American public.
Now, many have described the brazen upheavals decreed by the Trump administration as being the very opposite of secrecy—as, in fact, “saying the quiet part out loud.” In reality, however, in these first days of his second term in office, Trump and crew have taken secrecy to a new level, replacing it with a broad policy of erasure and invisibility. In fact, despite the administration’s pledge of “radical transparency” in areas like spending, a hostile onslaught against the written record has prevailed.
This determination to bury the record was apparent during the first Trump administration. He repeatedly asserted his right, for instance, not to document his meetings with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. In 2017, he reportedly confiscated notes that were taken at a meeting with Putin. In 2019, at the G-20 in Buenos Aires, he met Putin without either a translator or a note-taker present. The Washington Post reported, that “U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years.” In other words, on a matter of top national security concern—U.S.-Russian relations—a “cone of seclusion” was created, effectively leaving it to the two presidents to make decisions in secret. (Meanwhile, in his first term in office, Trump allegedly flushed down the toilet certain records relevant to the classified documents case against him.)
In his onslaught against record-keeping and the public’s right to know, the National Archives has become a prime target. Trump’s battle with the archives had its origins in his legal struggle over the classified documents he was alleged to have kept in his possession in violation of the law after his first administration, even supposedly destroying security camera footage taken at Mar-a-Lago that showed boxes of those documents being moved. Now, the president has fired the U.S. archivist, replacing a professional academic with Marco Rubio, despite his duties as secretary of state.
His outright refusal to keep a record of his administration’s activities is also reflected in his insistence that the records of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fall under the Presidential Records Act, which applies to the records of the president and vice president, and which comes with the guarantee that they can be withheld from the public for up to 12 years after he leaves office. The act also allows for the disposal of records, pending the approval of the national archivist.
In a further example of denying information as a form of politics, Trump’s Office of Professional Management ordered the removal of gender-related content from its websites (as well as the erasure of gender-identifying pronouns from e-mail signatures and an end to all gender-related programs and grants). This led to the removal of pages from the Census.gov website, as well as from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and military websites, and the replacement of the acronym LGBTQ+ with LGB. Under court order, some of these webpages have been put back up, even if with this defiant note:
Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality, and therefore the administration and this department rejects it.
In other words, the Trump administration’s claims of legitimacy for its purge of information remain strong. The legacy of state-sanctioned secrecy and a parallel burying of the record, inextricably tied to the post-9/11 era, has already found a secure footing in the second Trump presidency.
Undermining the Courts and the Law
Time and again in the war on terror, the Department of Justice and the courts deferred to the federal government in the name of national security. As a 2021 Brennan Center report noted, national security deference was apparent in decisions not to hear cases due to “states secret” claims, as well as in decisions that prioritized over civil-liberties guarantees and human-rights considerations what government lawyers argued were the constitutionally granted powers of the president in national security matters.
Under Trump, the second time around, it’s already clear that there’s going to be a full-scale assault on the legitimacy of the legal system. Witness the administration’s attacks on judges whose decisions have gotten in the way of his agenda. When a judge ordered the restoration of public health data that had been removed from government websites, he was summarily castigated by Elon Musk as “evil” and someone who “must be fired.” Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has already moved to squelch independent decision-making by immigration court judges, threatening them with nothing short of dismissal should they rule against the president’s prerogatives.
Then there are the attacks on law firms that have opposed Trump. Recently, for instance, security clearances were removed for lawyers at the law firms of Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2016 election, and Covington Burleigh, which represented Jack Smith, who investigated Trump in the Biden years. Lawyers from those firms were also banned from federal buildings. And don’t forget the all-out attempt to go after officials who investigated and prosecuted January 6 cases.
The idea of an independent Justice Department has been severely damaged, with the promise of so much more to come.
Evading Accountability
More often than not, the significant transformations of law and policy that grew out of the response to 9/11 were relegated to the pages of history with little or no accountability. The Senate, under Sen. Diane Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) leadership, did produce a report on the CIA’s use of torture. It detailed despicable acts of cruelty, and ultimately concluded that such techniques, decreed to be legal by the Department of Justice, were “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.” And immediately upon taking office in 2009, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order officially ending the use of torture. But he was decidedly against holding any officials accountable for what had occurred, preferring, as he so memorably put it, to “look forward, not backward.” In addition, Obama refused to call torture a “crime,” labeling it a mistake instead.
Today, in more mundane matters, the distaste for accountability has been institutionalized throughout the government. In his first term in office, Donald Trump dismissed or replaced five inspectors general, officials assigned to departments throughout the executive branch of government to monitor waste, abuse, and fraud. Almost immediately upon taking office this time around, he dismissed “roughly 17” of them. For the moment, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which, from its creation, never included an inspector-general position, is now under review by the Department of Treasury’s inspector general.
Trump’s aversion to accountability clearly reflects a desire to protect his own efforts to totally control executive policy. It should, however, also serve as a striking reminder of the aversion to accountability that followed the legalization and uses of torture in the post-9/11 years, the fabricated decision to go to war in Iraq, the mass surveillance of Americans in that era, and so much more. All of this set in place a grim template for the second Trump era—the notion that no one is ultimately accountable for abusing the law when their actions have been ordered (or simply approved) by the president.
Lessons (Un)learned
Given the magnitude of the most recent antidemocratic actions by Donald Trump and his team, blaming them on the slippery slope created during the war on terror years may seem like a distinct overreach. Yet, given the dangerous excesses we’re now witnessing, it’s worth remembering just how vulnerable the loss of certain norms of legality and accountability in those years left this country—and how sadly little we seem to have learned from that era.
Racism, a lack of deference for the courts, the failure to hold individuals and organizations accountable for informally rewriting the nation’s laws, the pervasive embrace of secrecy, and an unwillingness to erect strict guardrails to prevent the future manipulation of both laws and norms—all those realities of the war on terror years created a distinctly undemocratic template, however different in scale, for this Trumpian moment of ours. An unwillingness to be accountable or to circumvent secrecy during the war on terror led the country straight into today’s quagmire.
Today’s horrific moment should, in fact, be considered—to return to that word of mine one last time—a true perversification of past misdeeds, made all too possible by a failure in the post-9/11 years to take measures to prevent their recurrence.
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CNN Made FOIA Request About DOGE—Only to Learn FOIA Staff Was Fired
"Definitely never seen this type of response to a FOIA request," quipped one journalist.
Feb 18, 2025
When CNN put in a Freedom of Information Act request with the Office of Personnel Management for information related to security clearances for billionaire Elon Musk and other personnel at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency who have been allowed access to sensitive or classified government networks, the outlet got an unexpected response.
"Good luck with that, they just fired the whole privacy team," an OPM email address wrote back, according to Tuesday reporting from CNN. An OPM official told the outlet that the federal government's human resources agency did not layoff the entire privacy team, but did not comment further on the matter.
"Definitely never seen this type of response to a FOIA request," quipped CBS News journalist Jim LaPorta reacting to the news on X.
According to CNN, OPM's privacy team "is tasked with ensuring the agency's data privacy practices meet legal requirements and protect the trust of the public." Members of the agency's communications staff and employees who handle FOIA requests were also terminated, per CNN, which cited two unnamed sources.
Federal agencies are required to furnish information requested via FOIA unless the information falls within an exemption.
These firings at OPM, which is the chief human resources agency of the federal government, constitute "a move that limits outside access to government records related to the security clearances granted to Elon Musk and his associates," according to CNN, citing unnamed sources "familiar with the matter."
OPM was one of the first federal agencies to be infiltrated by Musk's associates at the Department of Government Efficiency and has been at the forefront of the Trump administration's purge of federal workers.
Last month, OPM sent out the now infamous "Fork in the Road" memo, which offered a widely decried deferred resignation program for nearly all federal employees. The message resembled—including the verbatim wording of the subject line—an email that Musk sent Twitter employees in 2022, when he took over the social media platform now known as X.
CNN's coverage also noted that the move to fire members of OPM's privacy and communication teams echoes Musk's decision to fire the media relations department at Twitter.
On X, Washington Post video journalist Jorge Ribas wrote the word "'transparency'" in response to CNN's reporting about the FOIA request, in an apparent nod to Musk's assertion that DOGE is attempting to be transparent in carrying out its operations.
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