Hegseth, Rubio, and Caine Had an Auto-Deleting Signal Chat

President Trump drew a simple lesson after his top national security advisers accidentally texted war plans to The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, last year. “I think we learned: Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?” he told Goldberg and others in the Oval Office on April 24, more than a month later. “If you want to know the truth. I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal.”But Trump’s top advisers did not heed his advice. Ten days after that interview with the president, his then–special envoy for Latin America, Mauricio Claver-Carone, was texting on Signal with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Rubio’s then-counselor, Mike Needham, in a group chat labeled “MMM.” The men had been conversing on the app since as early as April 15, when Claver-Carone reached out to Rubio and Needham.The State Department last week released records from the exchange, found on the phones of Rubio and Needham, in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation by Democracy Forward, which has filed more than 400 legal actions against the Trump administration since last January. The new release, which we reviewed, includes 13 Signal chats from the first six months of 2025 that have not been previously reported. The new records are screenshots of Signal groups that mostly lack context about when they were formed and what was discussed. The identities of nearly all of the group members are visible, revealing even broader use of Signal by top Trump-administration officials than was previously known. The names of the groups are also telling, including one called “Iran/Ukraine Planning” and another labeled “State USAID.”Read: The anti-Trump strategy that’s actually workingThe records raise the possibility that top administration officials failed to follow federal laws that require the preservation of government records. A screenshot from Rubio’s phone shows that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine was the administrator of a Signal group with Secretary of Defense Pete Heg