WASHINGTON — In years past, the move by senior members of President Donald Trump’s administration to share defense secrets over the Signal messaging app would have represented a serious breach that would have likely prompted investigations by the FBI and the Justice Department’s national security division.
Yet so far, neither the attorney general, Pam Bondi, nor the FBI director, Kash Patel, appear to be planning to investigate whether the communications described in a bombshell report in The Atlantic magazine Monday potentially violated federal laws like the Espionage Act.
The bureau and the department have undertaken these kind of investigations to figure out the extent of damage to the country’s national security, uncover other instances of recklessness and examine whether laws have been broken. Such an inquiry would be independent from — and far more thorough than — the self-policing, in-house review by the National Security Council announced Tuesday.
What Bondi and Patel do next is an important early test for two officials who promised during their confirmation hearings to administer justice impartially and free from political considerations that, in their view, led to criminal prosecutions of Trump during the Biden administration.
“This is something that would normally be investigated by the FBI and DOJ,” said Mary McCord, a longtime senior official for the Justice Department who now teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center.
“Even if a person is in lawful possession of national defense information, putting it on Signal — which is not an approved, secure means of communicating such information — prosecutors could determine it was gross negligence, which is a felony,” McCord said.
The FBI could open an inquiry into the episode if it were treated as the mishandling of classified information, said former federal law enforcement officials who have worked espionage cases. But the administration has insisted the information was not classified, complicating the potential for any criminal investigation. Congress could also make a referral to the Justice Department.
Speaking at the White House, Trump appeared to acknowledge the inquiry underway by the National Security Council but quickly added, “It’s not really an FBI thing.”
The Justice Department and FBI work independently but in tandem on such investigations: Only after the bureau concluded its inquiry would department officials determine whether charges were warranted.
Patel, speaking at a Senate hearing Tuesday, said he had been briefed on the matter but did not say whether the bureau would open a formal investigation. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment.
A spokesperson for Bondi declined to comment on whether she would authorize an investigation into the sharing of sensitive secrets over Signal by her fellow Cabinet members.
On Tuesday, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., called on Bondi to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Signal group, arguing that her status as a member of Trump’s Cabinet made it impossible for her “to conduct an investigation without the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
The Justice Department, under Bondi, has been willing to publicly acknowledge investigations involving what the political leadership sees as the mishandling of classified information. Last week, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, announced a criminal investigation into the “selective leak of inaccurate, but nevertheless classified, information” about efforts to deport members of a Venezuelan gang.
On Monday, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that he had been inadvertently included in a Signal group chat that shared highly sensitive details of an impending attack on Houthi insurgents in Yemen this year, organized by Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser.
Among the other participants: Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. Bondi was apparently not invited.
The dilemma faced by Bondi and Patel, both outspoken surrogates for Trump during the 2024 campaign, has added importance, given their maximalist approach to punishing political adversaries found to have improperly handled national security secrets.
Bondi and Patel, along with most of the participants in the Signal chat, were among those who said that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted for using a private email server to discuss governmental matters a decade ago.
“Hillary Clinton actually committed a crime through her handling of classified documents and was preemptively exonerated — a two-tiered justice system,” Patel wrote in his book “Government Gangsters,” published in 2023.
In one of her first appearances on the national political stage, in 2016, Bondi, then the attorney general of Florida, basked in anti-Clinton chants during a speech to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
“Lock her up!” Bondi said, echoing the audience. “I love that!”
While Signal is an encrypted program, its use is explicitly prohibited under a 2023 Defense Department memo that bans “non-DOD messaging systems” and “unclassified systems, government-issued or otherwise, for classified national security information.”
At a hearing Tuesday, Gabbard said she did not believe the information shared in the messages was classified. The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, argued that Hegseth has said the information was not classified, though he added that he had no way of verifying Hegseth’s claims.
© 2025 The New York Times Company
