National security adviser Michael Waltz, center, explains how a reporter ended up on a group Signal chat among top officials discussing a U.S. air attack on Yemen’s Houthis. (John McDonnell/For The Washington Post)
Members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have conducted government business over personal Gmail accounts, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and interviews with three U.S. officials.
The use of Gmail, a far less secure method of communication than the encrypted messaging app Signal, is the latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials already under fire for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.
A senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict, according to emails reviewed by The Post. While the NSC official used his Gmail account, his interagency colleagues used government-issued accounts, headers from the email correspondence show.
Waltz has had less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail, such as his schedule and other work documents, said officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe what they viewed as problematic handling of information. The officials said Waltz would sometimes copy and paste from his schedule into Signal to coordinate meetings and discussions.
The use of personal email, even for unclassified materials, is risky given the premium value foreign intelligence services place on the communications and schedules of senior government officials, such as the national security adviser, experts say.
NSC spokesman Brian Hughes said he has seen no evidence of Waltz using his personal email as described and said on occasions when “legacy contacts” have emailed him work-related materials, he makes sure to “cc” his government email to ensure compliance with federal records laws that require officials to archive official correspondence.
“Waltz didn’t and wouldn’t send classified information on an open account,” said Hughes.
When asked about a Waltz staffer discussing sensitive military matters over Gmail, Hughes said NSC staff have guidance about using “only secure platforms for classified information.”
Waltz has also created and hosted other Signal chats with Cabinet members on sensitive topics, including on Somalia and Russia’s war in Ukraine, said a senior administration official. The existence of those groups was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Hughes said that Signal “is approved and in some cases is added automatically to government devices.” He acknowledged that it is not supposed to be used for classified material and insisted Waltz never used it as such.
Waltz’s creation of a Signal group chat that discussed sensitive information and included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic and a prominent critic of President Donald Trump, has rankled the president and frustrated other Cabinet members whose communications were exposed on the chat.
Publicly, Trump has strongly backed Waltz, but on Wednesday he met with Vice President JD Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and others to discuss whether to keep him on. A day later, he informed aides he was not firing Waltz, but it was largely out of a desire to avoid giving the “liberal media a scalp,” said a senior administration official.
“This incident badly damaged Waltz,” said the official, who noted that the national security adviser was told after the meeting that he needed to be more deferential to Wiles. The Wednesday meeting was first reported by the New York Times.
Data security experts have expressed alarm that U.S. national security professionals are not more readily using the government’s suite of secure encrypted systems for work communications such as JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.
Most concerning, however, is the use of personal email, which is widely acknowledged to be susceptible to hacking, spearfishing and other types of digital compromise.
“Unless you are using GPG, email is not end-to-end encrypted, and the contents of a message can be intercepted and read at many points, including on Google’s email servers,” said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
National security experts have expressed alarm over the administration’s denial that the leaked Signal chat contained classified information.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s comments in the Signal chat detailed the sequencing, timing and weapons systems in advance of the Trump administration’s March attack on Houthi militants in Yemen, potentially jeopardizing U.S. airmen headed into harm’s way.
In the chat, Waltz offered a brief but highly specific after-action report of the strikes, revealing that the military had “positive ID” of a senior Houthi leader “walking into his girlfriend’s building” - pointing to what intelligence sources would later confirm was Israeli surveillance capabilities shared with the United States. Israeli officials expressed frustration that their capabilities were made public.
U.S. officials say Trump is much more upset about the inclusion of a liberal journalist on a confidential group chat than he is about exposing secrets to foreign adversaries. But White House officials have found Waltz’s denials increasingly hard to believe.
Waltz, who added Goldberg to the chat, told Fox News: “I take full responsibility. I built the group.” But he has subsequently said Goldberg’s contact information was “sucked into” his phone somehow and that he’s never met or talked to the journalist despite a newly circulated photo of the two men near each other at an event at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington.
“He’s telling everyone that he’s never met me or spoken to me. That’s simply not true,” Goldberg told “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “This isn’t ‘The Matrix.’ Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones,” he added.
Waltz, the first Green Beret elected to Congress and an adviser to former vice president Dick Cheney, has long pontificated about the importance of classified information and harshly criticized the Justice Department for not pursuing charges against Hillary Clinton for using a private email server as secretary of state.
“What did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing,” Waltz wrote on social media in June 2023.
While most Trump administration officials have downplayed the Signal breach publicly, some have acknowledged it was a significant mishap.
“Obviously, someone made a mistake. Someone made a big mistake,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters during a trip last week to Jamaica.
Rubio and his staff, who have years of experience with classified intelligence from his former role as vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, are known for taking operational security seriously, said a senior U.S. official.
Rubio noted that his contributions in the Signal chat were minimal.
“Just speaking for my role, I contributed to it twice,” Rubio told reporters. “I identified my point of contact, which is my chief of staff, and then later on … I congratulated the members of the team.”
On Sunday, Trump dismissed the controversy as a politically motivated attack. “I don’t fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts,” he said.
Hughes, the NSC spokesman, said that “Mike serves at the pleasure of President Trump and the President has voiced his support for the National Security Advisor multiple times this week.”
While Democrats have seized on the incident as evidence of incompetence, some in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party have assailed Waltz as a George W. Bush-aligned neoconservative, circulating a video from 2016 in which he condemned Trump as a draft-dodger, saying “Stop Trump now.”
“The chattering of unnamed sources should be treated with the skepticism of gossip from people lacking the integrity to attach their names,” Hughes said.
A key mark in Waltz’s favor is that the breach was discovered by a left-of-center media outlet and not conservative media, officials said.
“The one thing saving his job is that Trump doesn’t want to give Jeff Goldberg a scalp,” said a second administration official.
“Despite all of Trump’s attacks on the ‘fake news,’ he still reads the papers, and he doesn’t like seeing this stuff.”
