President Donald Trump’s second-term National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and his staff have reportedly used private Gmail accounts to conduct government business — a practice that appears to continue a pattern from the first Trump administration. Classified information should be handled carefully, and using private email and messaging apps for government business opens the door for dangerous security breaches and the potential for government records to be hidden from Freedom of Information Act requesters, if not destroyed altogether. Government accountability relies on the proper retention of public records, and it is imperative that officials conduct their work on appropriate channels to ensure records are preserved.
Government Business on Personal Email
The Federal Records Act requires that all government-related documents and correspondence be preserved, and if an official uses a private account for communication they must forward the content to their government account. But even after the first administration’s many records-related transgressions, serious concerns remain.
In November 2018, the Washington Post reported that the president’s oldest daughter and senior adviser had used a personal email account for official work on hundreds of occasions — a fact White House officials discovered after American Oversight filed a lawsuit the year before that sought Ivanka Trump’s emails with political appointees across the administration. In March 2019, her husband, Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, was found to have used a private WhatsApp messenger for work.
Betsy DeVos, education secretary during the first Trump administration, was found by the Education Department’s inspector general to have used four different personal email accounts for work. Former Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin used personal email to communicate with three members of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. So did his then chief of staff, Peter O’Rourke. In 2019, after suing under the Federal Records Act to compel the government to recover Shulkin’s emails, American Oversight learned that Shulkin had provided the VA with more than 22,000 pages of official communications from his personal accounts.
Several other first-term Trump officials also used personal accounts for government communications, including White House adviser Stephen Bannon, former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland —who reportedly used personal email to discuss selling nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia — and Kelly Craft, the former ambassador to the United Nations.
In March 2025, our lawsuit against the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) prompted the White House to unveil a newly created records retention policy that states DOGE employees must capture and retain all of their communications, including those on ephemeral and secretive messaging systems like Signal. The policy was released amid the scandal over top national security officials having used Signal for classified discussions about military strikes in Yemen, with at least some of the messages having been set to auto-delete. Notably, the DOGE retention policy does not prohibit employees from using Signal or personal devices, nor does it explicitly require the disabling of auto-delete settings.
Security Issues
While the National Security Council is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act or the Federal Records Act because of its role in advising the president, its records are subject to the Presidential Records Act and therefore certain communications might eventually need to be transferred to the National Archives and made accessible to the American people.
Moreover, the April 2025 Washington Post reporting that Waltz and his staff had used personal Gmail accounts for government business, including for sensitive communications with members of other agencies, raises serious concerns that those records could be lost or deleted. The Post spoke to an NSC spokesperson who said Waltz had copied his work email such communications. Despite this statement, however, the practice of copying work email accounts onto communications is hard to enforce and lacks oversight to ensure all records are kept. American Oversight filed several Freedom of Information Act requests seeking the release of any communications top officials at the CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Departments of State, Defense, and the Treasury have had with Waltz or NSC staff, including with associated non-governmental email accounts.
Classified Email on Unclassified Systems
In November 2019, the Daily Beast reported on emails obtained by American Oversight that show former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley had sent multiple emails containing classified information over an unclassified system because she had lost her password for such protected communications. Those emails, sent shortly after a July 2017 North Korean missile test, contained a number of redactions indicating that the content fell under the Freedom of Information Act’s “classified national defense” exemption.
American Oversight is continuing to investigate the Trump administrations’ record-keeping practices and officials’ personal email use for government work.
