This week served up the capper of Trump’s illegal conduct when we learned that Trump officials are coordinating their actions on Signal, an app with an auto delete feature, in violation of multiple federal laws requiring communications to be preserved and protected.

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 U.S. service members, or his reflexive, dry drunk anger at being asked about it.
• 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 U.S. 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. She did not mention Signal’s primary feature, which is a built-in option, activated 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 10 years in prison. 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 lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed,” “shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.” 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.