Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a court that he isn't deleting sensitive information discussed on Signal — then his lawyers had to retract that claim after he did precisely that.
According to The Atlantic, Rubio, "like most federal officials, is legally required to retain records that he creates as part of his job. So it was no surprise that his office ended up in court last year after The Atlantic revealed that he had participated in an auto-deleting Signal chat about war plans in Yemen with other top national-security officials."
A federal judge overseeing a Freedom of Information Act request about those records demanded "assurances that these documents had been preserved," the report said. To which Rubio's lawyers told the court they had software called LeapXpert installed that preserved all records regardless of whether a user deletes them, and a State Department adviser responded, “Secretary Rubio does not use the auto-deletion functions in third-party messaging applications when sending communications that may include federal records.”
Whether or not this was true at the time, it wasn't true for long, the report said.
"About two months later, Rubio changed the settings in a Signal chat about administration matters with other senior officials so that the messages would automatically delete after a set amount of time, a person familiar with the exchange told us," said The Atlantic. Asked for comment, a State Department official "contested the idea that Rubio has made a practice of turning on disappearing messages but said that he could not address the specific instance."
Regardless, according to the report, when a broad swathe of department agencies disclosed their recordkeeping practices as part of a settlement, the State Department appeared to quietly walk back its claims about Rubio not using disappearing messages, "instead stating that an application installed on his device collected messages 'even if those messages otherwise have a deletion timeline setting enabled.'"
All of this comes after a series of broader scandals about how the Trump administration is sharing information behind the scenes, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth using Signal to inappropriately share war plans in an unsecured environment that included reporters.
