Sen. Schiff Asks National Archives To Investigate Trump Admin’s Group Chats

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Monday asked the National Archives and Records Administration to investigate the Trump administration for using self-deleting third-party messaging apps to conduct government business, likely in violation of records preservation laws.

The action follows multiple damning reports about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal, a commercial messaging app, to share highly sensitive information about an upcoming military attack on Yemen with his wife and “about a dozen” others.

Hegseth’s wife is not a government employee and was already being scrutinized for attending sensitive meetings with foreign military officials without the required clearances.

It’s the second such fiasco in under a month, leading Schiff to believe Signal is being used widely throughout the Trump administration ― and not just at the Defense Department.

In March, Americans learned of a similar group chat after Trump officials mistakenly added a reporter for The Atlantic to the war strike group chat, to the reporter’s extreme disbelief.

That chat involved highly senior Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“It is imperative that NARA contact each federal agency with personnel involved in the Signal conversations to ensure that all records have been preserved,” Schiff wrote in his letter Monday.

“NARA must exercise its authority to investigate whether each of the individuals included in the groups forwarded the entirety of the Signal exchange to their official government accounts and preserved the records prior to their auto-deletion, as is required by law for recordkeeping purposes.”

In addition to concerns about records not being properly preserved, Schiff flagged the clear national security risks inherent in using a commercial app to coordinate sensitive military operations while abroad.

At the time of last month’s military strikes in Yemen, for instance, Rubio was in Canada, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff was in Russia and Azerbaijan, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was on an Indo-Pacific tour in Thailand and India. All three participated in the chat.

“Given the reckless and careless manner by which the Administration utilized the messaging application in this context, there is a strong reason to believe that senior political appointees have engaged widely in such practices when discussing other sensitive national security matters,” wrote Schiff.