Bulwark Takes - Trouble for Trump Admin? Group Sues Over Illegal Signal Messages

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Tim Miller is joined by Chioma Chukwu of American Oversight to discuss the illegality of the infamous Signal group chat, and why the organization is suing over violations of federal-records laws.

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heard around the world. And I wanted to talk to her about the lawsuit because I think there's one element of what you guys are focused on that's getting a little bit lost in the shuffle. So thanks for doing it. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Talk to us about what you guys are focused on here with regards to records retention and what these guys are doing? Sure. Well, just to start out, American Oversight is a watchdog organization that monitors governments to ensure that they are complying with federal records law and other open record laws at the state level. And so here, when we learned that there were national security officials who were communicating in an insecure application about highly sensitive information, likely classified, that were set to auto-delete,

we had many, many, many concerns. And so we moved quickly because we knew that every day that passed, more records would be destroyed, meaning that those communications that took place in March, between March 11th and March 15th, would continue to delete. And those are records that belong to the American people. So we knew that we had to move quickly. Yeah, one of the funny, I think, darkly comic things about the text when Jeffrey Goldberg released them is Waltz changes the settings, right, in Signal. It was like they're set to auto-delete, I think, after one week, and he changed it to after four weeks. But they're required by law to retain all of this, right? And so unless they had kind of a separate process, they were breaking the law and having

this conversation. That's exactly right. This is very simple. It is not complicated. The Federal Records Act requires that agencies, agency heads, their staff, they create, maintain and preserve records in accordance with the Federal Records Act. It is evident that that did not happen here. And so that's why, you know, we moved quickly. I was struck. I don't know. Did you see the attorney general's press conference the other day. Yeah, so she's after this. And there are a number of different things that should be investigated here. The specific issue that you're talking about with regards to records retention, obviously then there's a question about classification

and whether they're releasing classified documents. But she references the Hillary Clinton scandal where she had a private server. If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton's home that she was trying to bleach bit. And like the interesting thing about that is she was using that as a rationalization for not investigating this, when in reality there was an extensive investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private server by, you know, government officials, by Department of Justice officials. So

like what did you make of the Attorney General just being so dismissive about the idea that this should be looked into? I mean, it's unsurprising. It is more of the same as just the deflection, the distraction, the downplaying, because they know they were caught red-handed. And they know that if they admit that what they did violated the law to them, it's a sign of weakness. And we are here to show that you guys are not above the law. To them, it's a sign of weakness. And we are here to show that

you guys are not above the law. You have to comply with the same records. And as the attorney general, your responsibility is to initiate an enforcement action to ensure that they are going to comply going forward. And so she was bending herself in knots to try and justify why Hillary Clinton's email usage was somehow different when, as you said, we all remember Benghazi. And so, yeah, it didn't pass muster. And we all remember James Comey. We all remember. It was the most studied, it was the most investigated server out there.

And for good, I mean, rightly in certain cases, right? Like it doesn't matter what party you are if you're not following the records retention request. Like those are our records of the American people's talk to us about the size of this lawsuit is just specifically about this one chat. And, and we've had a ruling already from, from judge Bosberg. Talk to us about that. Yeah. So our lawsuit, we filed a lawsuit that was seeking to preserve records across the relevant

agencies, but the, but the TRO or the temporary restraining order, which was at ESU yesterday, that is the matter where Judge Boasberg ruled in favor of American oversight, was to prevent the agencies from further destruction and to ensure that they would preserve any record that has not already been deleted. And so that was the order that came down yesterday. And so what we are expecting as a next step is that the agencies will take steps to preserve if they haven't already. And then on Monday, we are expecting them to declare before the court what steps they in fact took to ensure the preservation of those records. Got it. Because the other thing I'm wondering what your jurisdiction is on all this, because, you know, obviously there are other chats.

I mean, just the name Houthi PC small group kind of implies that there's a large group at the beginning of the chat. They I don't have the transcript from me, but they say essentially like moving the chat here. Right. So so they kind of imply that there's another chat happening somewhere else. So what kind of role could a group like yours have when it comes to other records besides the ones we know about? Well, that's a great point. We know that this administration has made clear that their modus operandi is to ensure that they are not communicating in a transparent, open way. They don't want people to know what they're talking about. They don't want people to know about the decisions that they're making. We know that before this administration took place in January during inauguration,

there were communications happening and trainings happening with contributors to Project 2025 that were saying, this is how we are going to operate in the new administration. We are going to evade oversight. We are going to use messaging applications so that those communications aren't discoverable. So this was all foreshadowed. And then we subsequently learned that before inauguration, that certain members of DOGE, through their planning, they were using Signal. And we know that there's Signal usage with many of the Doge members now. So we have reason to believe this is a pervasive issue across the administration. This is just one sliver of a larger issue. And frankly, it comes from the top.

Right. And for people who might not get it, why the records preservation is so important. The FOIA Act allows people in the future to go and see how, you know, how government decisions were made, how taxpayer money was used. If all these records get deleted, then, you know, there's no way for folks to be held accountable in the future for other groups to, you know, get information about how the government is using money. Talk about that. That's exactly right. What people need to understand about this particular case first, we are concerned not just because they're using signal. There are problems with

that in and of itself. We're concerned because what they were communicating about in a cavalier manner had the potential implication of jeopardizing the lives of our men and women in uniform. People could have been killed if that information had been intercepted by our foreign adversaries. And remember, we learned that the DOD had issued an advisory just days before communicating that signal was not secure and that there had been activity of Russian actors trying to get access to signal communications. So that's what's operating in the background. But generally speaking, people need to understand that when information is not preserved and the people want to understand how their government's working, they want to know how decisions were being made. Why were those decisions made to cut

government benefits? Why were decisions made to fire employees? Why were decisions made to cut government benefits? Why were decisions made to fire employees? Why were decisions made that ultimately increased my taxes? If those records are not preserved, they'll never have the answers to that. And that's why it's so important to continue keeping pressure to get them to turn over records because the government works for us, not the other way around. And when we ask for the information, they should be giving it to the people because again they they said they were going to be maximally transparent we are seeing that is completely uh nothing could be farther from the truth here and so we are just making sure that we are holding them accountable makes sense what else uh is american oversight doing what else what else are you guys working on oh man uh we are busy this administration is keeping us very very busy i mean

we have um we have some lawsuits against Doge because, again, Doge has just been so incredibly non-transparent. They have argued that they are not subject to the Federal Records Act. They went as far as moving Doge into the executive office of the president so that no one can access those records. Again, this is a pattern of secrecy that we continue to see from this administration. And it's not just in this instance. We're also challenging the decision to fire the inspectors general. We're trying to figure out why did they do that? Why were they trying to gut federal transparency infrastructure, get rid of all the watchdogs, Democratic members

on independent agencies? They are gutting systematically every single mechanism that would essentially serve as an impediment to their very destructive agenda. And so American Oversight is just demanding information across the government about all of its destructive actions. We believe that the people are entitled to this information. It belongs to the people and it should be turned over. Hey, thanks so much. It's Shoma Chukwu. Thank you for coming on. That's American Oversight.

Go check out their organization. We appreciate the work you're doing. Thank you. All right. We'll see you.