The White House is telling staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency to preserve their Signal messages, Politico reported.
It's not the first time Signal messages have made headlines. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was added to a Signal group chat by national security adviser Mike Waltz that featured top officials in the Trump administration. The Atlantic's story showed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth provided times of warplane launches, strike packages, and targets of Houthi rebels in Yemen.
"If you happen to receive work-related messages on your personal device — whether via text, Signal, a personal email address, or otherwise — make sure to capture and transmit those messages to your work device (such as by screenshotting and forwarding)," the one-page policy read.
The policy is in court documents after a lawsuit was filed by American Oversight last month, which cited news reports that DOGE employees were conducting business over Signal, deleting their transcripts along the way, Politico reported.
American Oversight has also filed a lawsuit over the story in The Atlantic, asserting the auto-delete function violates federal recordkeeping laws, according to Politico.
Politico said it is unknown if the policy was directly a result of the story. DOGE is overseen by tech CEO Elon Musk and was recently ordered by a federal judge to comply with public record requests. DOGE had argued that as an office in the White House, it was immune from those requests.
Attorneys for the Department of Justice said in court filings that all DOGE documents are being preserved in compliance with the Presidential Records Act.
DOGE "regularly instructs its employees to preserve presidential records in all forms, including as recently as two days ago," the Justice Department argued.
Sam Barron ✉
Sam Barron has almost two decades of experience covering a wide range of topics including politics, crime and business.
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