Lock him up: What the Espionage Act has to say about disappearing content
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In the past month, Trump has threatened to imprison peaceful protest organizers, falsely declared a national invasion, invoked war powers in time of peace, serially ignored court orders, and sent people to an El Salvador prison without due process or review, all while making outrageous comments meant to distract the public from his administration’s illegal conduct.
This week served up the capper when we learned that Trump officials are coordinating their deeds on Signal, an app with an auto delete feature, in violation of multiple federal laws requiring communications to be preserved and protected.
All angles spell danger for the Republic
The Signal breach is appalling from all sides, each so dangerous it is hard to determine which angle is more threatening from a national security perspective:
· That Secretary of Defense Hegseth sloppily jeopardized the lives of US service members, or his reflexive, dry drunk anger at being asked about it.
· That Trump didn’t appear to know (or remember) anything about the scandal several hours after it broke on international news, or that he doesn’t understand why it matters.
· That his spokes child tried (again) to discredit the media, or that she thinks “war plan” vs. “attack plan” is a meaningful semantic distinction when targets, weaponry, and attack sequencing are revealed to enemy eyes.
· That the national security advisor went on Fox News to take ‘full responsibility’ for the Signal error, or that he then called the Atlantic editor ‘scum’ for reporting the story in the first place.
· That Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, doesn’t know that US intelligence laws apply to all “national defense information,” not just “classified information,” or Trump’s irrelevant, false messaging that “no classified information” was included on the Signal exchange.
As the absurdity of this clown car of ignorance and arrogance unfolds, the most dangerous aspect of it has, at least so far, received the least media attention: Trump advisors are exchanging official communications on an app deliberately set to delete all evidence of their communications, which appears to be their standard operating procedure.
Trump’s team is breaking federal law by deleting evidence
Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, testified this week at a Congressional hearing that the Signal app came “pre-installed on government devices,” suggesting its use was not limited to the Yemen fiasco. From the content of the group chat published this week by The Atlantic— only published because Trump officials kept lying about what was on it—Signal looks like the default method used by administration officials to communicate with one another. The Yemen group chat explicitly referred to another such chat, making clear that this was not their first.
Gabbard, in her testimony, did not mention Signal’s primary feature, which is a built-in option, exercised by Trump officials, to automatically destroy its own contents on a pre-selected date. The Yemen screenshots show that, in coordinating their airstrikes, Trump officials set Signal to erase all messages coordinating them. Some were set to disappear after one week, and some were set to disappear after four weeks.
Deleting official communications is a federal crime, punishable by up to ten years in prison.
It is a crime to destroy any federal record
Legal mandates including the Espionage Act, the Presidential Records Act, and the Records Management by Federal Agencies Act require that ALL federal records created by the President, Vice President, cabinet agencies, and the intelligence community be preserved, protected, and produced for review by any court of jurisdiction that requires them.
Under the Espionage Act, 18 USC § 793, anyone who through gross negligence permits such information “to be removed from its proper place of custody” or allows it “to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed,” or fails to promptly report any such destruction to his superior officer “Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” Because of the typo-free and specific attack details in his lengthy texts, Hegseth appears to have cut and pasted the attack plan from a secured source into the unsecure app, thereby endangering the lives of the servicemen involved.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 2071, anyone who conceals, removes, or mutilates records “shall be fined, imprisoned not more than three years, or both and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.” The disqualification is mandatory, not discretionary.
The worst takeaway from Signalgate is Trump’s attempts to block scrutiny
Even if sharing the Signal chat on Yemen was a mistake, as officials claim, choosing to set the date(s) on which all content would be destroyed could only be deliberate, a fact not lost on American Oversight. After the Signal breach was reported, American Oversight filed suit against Hegseth, Gabbard, Marco Rubio and other officials, seeking to enjoin the Trump administration from continuing to destroy evidence of their own conduct. As detailed in their complaint, Trump officials appear to be using Signal in other governance contexts as well, creating records that are deliberately destroyed in violation of the Federal Records Act and/or the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”).
The purpose of FOIA and federal records laws is transparency: to make sure we know what our government is doing, to protect American citizens from rogue and illegal government actions. Under the Constitution, this power belongs to the people.
Transparency in government is one of our oldest and most sacrosanct rights; it is what protects us from jackboots in the night. By running “off the books” official communications, Trump advisors are deliberately circumventing federal law to evade public and legal scrutiny, in line with Project 2025’s calls to conceal damning information from the public.
That Trump, his buffoonish cabinet, and the architects of Project 2025 would go to such lengths to hide what they are up to should keep every American up at night.
Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
This latest debacle was more than upsetting. The daily dismantling of our federal government is heartbreaking but this breach is personal. My father was in the navy during World War II. My two brothers fought in Viet Nam. All three have passed away. Current members of the military put their lives on the line every day for our freedom. To have these inexperienced yahoos leading our country and endangering the lives of our service men and women is mind blowing. No documentation. No accountability. No spine. And these are the role models for the next generation. We must stop this madness. Thank you, Sabrina, and all journalists, for your courage and perseverance in continuing to educate and inform the public.
There is nothing encrypted about communications on Signal. It's similar to other such group chat enabled apps, such as Telegram or WhatsApp. The difference is the "set to delete" feature which, as you point out, is consistent with the goal of Project 2025 of hiding all potentially damaging information. Two things: one, no doubt the Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies already have the phone numbers of all involved in the call and, at a minimum, they can tell when all these phones are buzzing back and forth "signalling" that something big is going on. Moreover, due to lack of encryption, they may have hacked into the digital record of the calls if not the calls themselves. Second, add to this farce the rogue DOGE activity, and Trump's laissez-faire attitude to it all, and this is yet one more instance that demonstrates the Trump administration's adherence not to the Constitution and all applicable laws, but rather to Project 2025 dictates. There will be repercussions of this intelligence failure that will play out in yet unknown ways to the detriment of our military prerogatives.