[guest post by Dana]

Unsurprising:

FBI Director Kash Patel was not part of a Signal chat in which other Trump administration national security officials discussed detailed attack plans, but that didn’t spare him from being questioned by lawmakers this week about whether the nation’s premier law enforcement agency would investigate.

Patel made no such commitments during the course of two days of Senate and House hearings, declining to comment on the possibility and testifying that he had not personally reviewed the text messages that were inadvertently shared with the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic who was mistakenly included on an unclassified Signal chat.

The Justice Department has broad discretion to open an investigation, though Attorney General Pam Bondi, who introduced Trump at a Justice Department event this month, signaled at an unrelated news conference on Thursday that she was disinclined to do so. She repeated Trump administration talking points that the highly sensitive information in the chat was not classified, though current and former U.S. officials have said the posting of the exact launch times of aircraft and times that bombs would be released before those pilots were even in the air would have been classified.

But you know what is going to be investigated?:

The Justice Department recently announced it will crack down on the rising number of attacks against Tesla, including charging people accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at the automaker’s properties.

“This is domestic terrorism. Those responsible will be pursued, caught, and brought to justice,” FBI Director Kash Patel said Monday.

Attorney General Pam Bondi also described the anti-Tesla acts as “domestic terrorism” last week, after a person dressed in black shot and set fire to several Tesla vehicles at a repair facility in Las Vegas. Tesla sales and stock prices are also facing stiff declines.

While it makes sense to investigate domestic terrorism, if the definition is met, how does it make sense to not investigate the Signal security breach where our national security was put at risk because of the careless actions of senior administration officials knowingly breaking the rules/law.

Q: “In terms of the Signal chat controversy…is the DOJ involved at this point?”

Bondi: “…We're not going to comment any further on that. If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton's home that she was trying to BleachBit.” pic.twitter.com/ECwOiK4dNn

— The Bulwark (@BulwarkOnline) March 27, 2025

Anyway, Timothy Snyder has a smart piece, wherein he warns of the deeper reasons for administration officials using Signal. And it’s not pretty. I’m quoting liberally here:

But in the Signalgate scandal, we encounter something more chilling: our government is openly compromising our national security, the better to violate our rights. Its position is that it is worth risking the lives of soldiers abroad in order to be able to persecute civilians at home.

. . .

From the content of the group chat, it is clear that Signal (and, again, likely on personal phones) is the default way that Musk-Trump high officials communicate with one another. This group chat explicitly referred to another one. There was a protocol at the beginning of this chat, which seemed familiar to everyone. It involved adding people whose Signal numbers were known, as if this were a standard procedure. No one during the chat wrote anything like: “hey, why are we using Signal?” The reason that no one did so, most likely, is that they all do this every day.

Using Signal enables American authorities to violate the rights of Americans. Signal is attractive not because it is secure with respect to foreign adversaries, which it is not, but because it is secure with respect to American citizens and American judges. The autodelete function, which Mike Waltz was using, violates the law. But what is most essential is the purpose of that law: to protect the rights of Americans from their government. The timed deletion function allows American officials to be confident that their communications will never be recorded and that they can therefore conspire without any chance of their actions being known to citizens at the time or at any later point.

Everyone on that group chat, including the Vice-President, the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of State, knew that what they were doing was against the rules, the guidance, and the law. But they were doing what they were doing, I would suggest, for a reason: precisely because it allowed them or their colleagues to compromise the rights of Americans.

In other words, it was worth risking the lives of American soldiers abroad in order to have the opportunity the violate the rights of American civilians at home. Making soldiers unsafe is apparently a price worth paying to make the rest of us also unsafe.

If Signal is used for the most sensitive national security discussions, it is reasonable to ask whether it is also used in discussions about sensitive matters of domestic policy — for example in the discussions of deportations to the Salvadoran gulag or in plans for targeting other individuals. If this is correct, then consider this: when the government contemplates deporting you, it will be doing so on an app that allows those discussions to be secret, not from foreign adversaries, but from you and from judges.
And that, it would appear, is why Signal is being used — and will be used.

Snyder concludes:

Even as the Musk-Trump people continue to say that we must sacrifice our rights for national security, they are also starting to say that they find it worthwhile to violate national security in order to have the tools that allow them to violate our rights. In Signalgate, we see the shift from the conventional excuse for authoritarian practices to an open embrace of tyranny for its own sake.

P.S. Quite possibly the DoD was ordered to use Signal on government devices:

A high level information security source inside the Department of Defense has informed me that a month ago they were ordered by political appointees to ignore information security regulations and install Signal on government phones for senior leaders.

. . .

On February 18th, Katie Arrington was named the Deputy Chief Information Officer for Cybersecurity and Chief Information Security Officer at the Department of Defense by the Trump Administration. She had served in the previous Administration in a similar role.

According to my source inside the Pentagon, shortly after Arrington’s arrival at DoD she issued a waiver and authorized the various service CIO’s to deploy Signal on government devices.

This means that even as DOD sent a memo out warning against the use of Signal the same organization had authorized, and demanded, it’s use across the DOD. The messaging app is popular because its encrypted but most importantly allows disappearing messages on a schedule. This is a direct violation of the Presidential Records Act that requires preservation of all Executive Branch records.

. . .

All of this informs us that the Trump Administration is using a commercial non-secure disappearing messaging app to communicate to avoid record keeping laws and national security regulations. This means that it is highly likely our enemies are able to monitor the high level communications of our government…in real time.

Remind me how an investigation is *not* warranted?

—Dana