Hegseth Set His Pentagon Messages to Self-Destruct AFTER SignalGate

New records reveal Pete Hegseth ran government business on Signal, a consumer messaging app, with chats rigged to auto-delete, instead of the locked-down classified system built to keep foreign adversaries out. The documents, pried loose by Democracy Forward and reported by The Atlantic, expose 13 previously unseen Signal chats from senior officials.Signal is a good app, but it is not the government’s classified system. Cabinet officials get hardened equipment and secure facilities so that military planning doesn’t live on the same kind of phone you could drop in an airport. And it’s not hypothetical: a Signal-style archiving tool one of these officials was photographed using, made by TeleMessage, reportedly got breached by hackers.The chats were also set to auto-delete. One with Hegseth, Rubio, and the Joint Chiefs chairman wiped every 8 hours. A 17-person thread with Hegseth, Vance, and Lutnick wiped every week. Federal law requires the government to preserve these records, and a chat that erases itself three times a day does the opposite.They were told to stop. In April, in the Oval Office, Trump told The Atlantic’s editor “maybe don’t use Signal.” Ten days later, senior officials were still on it, in chats with names like “Iran/Ukraine Planning.”When lawyers closed in, the government bought software called LeapXpert, which advertises itself as turning Signal into a “government-grade communication channel,” and switched it on about a day before a court deadline, with four months of messages already gone.A servicemember who left classified material on an unsecured device would be prosecuted. The Secretary of Defense did it at scale and the White House called it “old news.”Sources:https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2026/06/hegseth-rubio-caine-signal-auto-delete/https://democracyforward.org/updates/signalgate-foia/https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/pete-hegseth-and-marco-rubio-stayed-on-signal-chats-records-show-despite-trump-warning/ Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe