NSA Mike Waltz Used Gmail for Government Work — Here’s Why That Matters
The use of non-governmental communication channels for official business is alarming for the obvious security implications, as well as from a record-keeping standpoint.
On Tuesday, in the midst of the White House’s attempts to downplay high-level national security officials’ use of Signal to coordinate military operations, a new story emerged that has kept the alarm bells ringing about the Trump administration’s questionable communication practices.
The Washington Post reported that members of the National Security Council (NSC) — including National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who had started the Signal group chat at the center of the current scandal — have used personal Gmail accounts to conduct government business.
The revelations are alarming because of the very obvious security implications. According to the Post, a senior aide to Waltz used Gmail for “highly technical conversations … involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict.” The reporting also notes that Waltz has created and hosted other Signal chat groups with Cabinet members on sensitive topics, and on Wednesday Politico reported that Waltz’s team had set up at least 20 Signal group chats to discuss sensitive information about crises around the world — a startling indication that the use of the messaging app is more widespread than just the single instance of Cabinet officials planning military strikes in Yemen in the presence of a journalist who was added to the chat by mistake.
The use of non-official communication channels for government business is also of concern from a record-keeping standpoint. With Signal, an encrypted app, messages can be set to autodelete after a certain time, as was the case with the Yemen group chat. That’s why American Oversight filed its lawsuit last week against chat participants Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Secretary of State and acting Archivist Marco Rubio for violations of the Federal Records Act (FRA) and the Administrative Procedure Act. Two days later, the court granted our request that defendants be ordered to preserve the Signal messages from March 11 to 15, the dates of the group chat.
While Gmail or other similar commercial email platforms don’t have the same autodelete implications, and messages can be recovered on those platforms after being deleted, their use for official work is still problematic. In the case of the agencies overseen by the officials mentioned above, their records are subject to the FRA and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and officials must take steps to ensure records are preserved in official channels, for instance by forwarding messages from personal email to their government account. But ensuring compliance is difficult — it’s hard to know if an FRA violation occurred if you can’t see it — and thus conducting government work on personal accounts should be discouraged.
It’s even harder for agencies that are instead subject to the Presidential Records Act, as is the NSC. But even under the PRA, which grants the president wide discretion over the disposal of covered records, certain records must be preserved to (eventually) be transferred to the National Archives — and thus the American people. According to an NSC spokesperson quoted in the Post, Waltz “makes sure to ‘cc’ his government email to ensure compliance with federal records laws” — but questions remain about the extent to which Waltz and others were using Gmail for government work, and what exactly they were saying on that platform. On Wednesday, American Oversight filed FOIA requests to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the State Department, and the Treasury for top officials’ communications with any non-governmental email accounts associated with Waltz or NSC staff.
The latest news about Waltz’s email habits is not the first time high-level officials appointed by President Trump have exhibited an apparently cavalier attitude toward email practices designed to hold officials accountable to the people and to history.