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SSecretary of State Marco Rubiolike most government officials, he is required by law to keep the records he creates as part of his job. So it was not surprising that his office ended up in court last year after Atlantic has been revealed that he participated in an automatic clearing of the Signals about plans for the war in Yemen with other senior national security officials. In a case involving a Freedom of Information Act request for Signal records on Rubio’s phone, a federal judge wanted assurances that these documents had been preserved.
Rubio’s team told the court that his state phone had software called LeapXpert that automatically saved from Signals “all messages sent or received, regardless of whether the sender configures the message to ‘auto-delete.'” Seven weeks later, in another announcement to the court, the State Department went further. “Secretary Rubio does not use automatic deletion functions in third-party messaging applications when sending communications that may include federal records,” Susan Weetman, senior counsel for the department’s Information Access Programs Directorate, told the court on Sept. 9.
But the denial, written in the present tense, was less than it appeared. About two months later, Rubio changed the settings in Ishara’s conversations about administration matters with other top officials so that the messages would automatically delete after a set time, a person familiar with the exchange told us, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to share the information. When we reached the State Department for comment, the official who responded disputed the idea that Rubio had a habit of turning on the missing messages but said he could not address that specific incident.
The State Department told us that Signal remains an authorized communications application, that LeapXpert has been installed on some government officials’ phones, and that the department remains committed to fully complying with records retention laws. “These measures support compliance even when users adjust app settings, including the ‘lost message’ setting of the Signal app,” a department official told us, speaking on condition of anonymity to address agency regulations. The department did not respond to questions about why Rubio would have decided to activate the missing messages if his phone had software that ensured the messages could not be fully deleted.
Jason R. Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland and former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration, told us that as long as a copy is kept on file, there is nothing in the law that prevents the deletion of messages from an officer’s phone. Doing so may even provide security benefits if the phone is lost or hacked. “It can be said that it is a good practice to remove unnecessary records in many places,” Baron said.
The Foreign Affairs Manual, which governs the conduct of most State Department officials, states that “the use of ‘ephemeral’ or self-destructive features with Messaging software is strictly prohibited.” Such options should be “disabled or remain disabled to maintain the integrity, availability and preservation of official records,” guidance he says. The State Department official said the agency has issued additional guidance to officials who have installed LeapXpert, because the technology will ensure that their messages are archived even if they use the auto-delete feature and the messages disappear from the Wave. The manual does not show this, because very few officers are given access to LeapXpert.
DDemocracy Forward is presented case to obtain Ishara’s conversations from the first half of 2025 from Rubio’s phone calls with Mike Needham, who was then Rubio’s top State Department aide. The defense group has reserved the right to file further arguments in the case after the State Department generated documents last month that showed Rubio or Needham had participated in 13 previous job-related Signal chats. The heavily redacted documents include a three-person conversation between Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine in which messages were scheduled to be automatically deleted after eight hours. “Democracy Forward is closely monitoring this latest development in light of the State Department’s representation that Secretary Rubio is not sending a missing message, and we are evaluating next steps,” Dan McGrath, the chief oversight advisor at Democracy Forward, told us in a statement.
Last year, Democracy Forward raised questions with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia about what Weetman meant when he said that Rubio “does not use” automatic recusals, claims made under penalty of perjury. “Rather, the Resolution shows that the Secretary does not have it for now use autodelete, but that representation does not shed light on the storage of archives created before the Secretary. hypothetical operational change,” the group’s lawyers wrote to the court.
Earlier this year, as part of a settlement with the watchdog group American Oversight, several government agencies filed court declarations on April 30 to explain their record-keeping practices. What is known: The State Department did not repeat its claim from last year that Rubio did not use the missing messages, instead saying that software installed on his device collected the messages “even if the messages had the timeline setting enabled.”
In the same filing, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a broad reassurance, saying that Signal conversations of senior staff “are not currently set to be automatically deleted.” The Department of Defense said that as of April 26, 2025, there were no “Internet conversations with government records at risk of exposure or automatic deletion” on Hegseth’s phone. The CIA told the court that as of March 12, all messages on Signal were archived and that the agency was not aware of any federal records that were “at risk of being deleted.”
But the continued use of Signal by senior officials worries some on Capitol Hill. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a Republican, has a personal reason for his concern that the platform may not be safe. “Russia hacked my Token,” recently he announcedafter an apparent fraud attempt by a foreign government. Bacon and Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, recently wrote a letter, first reported by Politicsto the Pentagon and the National Intelligence Directorate asking for a summary of what information management officials are presenting about Signal and the platform’s vulnerabilities. Members of Congress argued that even unclassified information, if intercepted in non-governmental chat software, could generally betray “critical intelligence” that could “inform an adversary’s decisions.” Bacon told us in a statement that Cabinet secretaries should stop relying so much on Signal.
“The Russians and the Chinese are tracking them, and they have to act like that every day,” he said.
