All of the messages from a leaked group chat have been deleted from the phone of John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, the agency said in a court filing.
Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, created a chat group and invited cabinet members and their aides to discuss the administration’s plans to strike Houthi militia targets in Yemen last month. But Mr. Waltz inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, who eventually published the texts.
Democrats and other critics have said that the officials in the chat on the commercial app Signal revealed classified and sensitive information, including the times U.S. airstrikes were being launched from ships. Testifying before Congress last month, Mr. Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said that the information was not classified.
The watchdog group American Oversight said the messages were federal records and sued in an effort to preserve the chats.
In court papers filed on Monday, Hurley V. Blankenship, the C.I.A.’s chief data officer, declared that he had reviewed screenshots from Mr. Ratcliffe’s account. But he said only “residual administrative content” remained, including the name of the chat, the “Houthi PC small group.”
“The screenshot,” Mr. Blankenship said, “does not include substantive messages from the Signal chat.”
Many Signal users activate a setting that automatically deletes messages, a feature that increases the security of the encrypted chats. The Atlantic reported that some of the messages that were shared with Mr. Goldberg were set to delete a week later. Others were set to delete in four weeks. The court papers filed by the C.I.A. suggested that those settings may have been changed just before or after a judge issued an order to preserve the records.
Simply changing the deletion timer would not have automatically deleted texts that had been sent.
Chioma Chukwu, the interim executive director of American Oversight, said on Tuesday that the Trump administration had an obligation to preserve communications among top officials, and that the deletion of the Signal messages appeared to be illegal destruction of federal records.
“Using encrypted, disappearing messages on Signal for official government business violates the Federal Records Act and represents a calculated strategy to undermine transparency and accountability despite the grave risk it poses to our national security and the safety of our men and women in uniform,” Ms. Chukwu said.
On March 27, Judge James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington ordered several Trump administration officials who participated in the chat to preserve records of the communications. The judge then ordered the government to provide declarations about their efforts to preserve federal records.
American Oversight said Mr. Blankenship’s declaration indicated that message settings were changed on March 26 and March 28, the days before and after the judge’s order. The C.I.A. reviewed screenshots of Mr. Ratcliffe’s phone on March 31, after the message settings appear to have been changed.
American Oversight has said it plans to file an amended complaint in court to try to learn details of other Signal groups started by government officials.
Seamus Hughes contributed research.
