Top national security officials at the White House, including national security advisor Michael Waltz, have sometimes been using regular Gmail accounts to discuss highly sensitive military operations, according to a new report from the Washington Post. Gmail is not end-to-end encrypted like more secure government systems available to officials like Waltz and can be intercepted by foreign adversaries.
The Gmail accounts were used to discuss “sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict,” according to the Post, citing three unnamed government officials and emails reviewed firsthand by the newspaper. Personal email accounts of any kind are not considered a secure way to communicate sensitive information, though National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes told the Post that no classified information was transmitted over insecure channels.
The report comes after Waltz and roughly two dozen officials were outed as using Signal to discuss attack plans in Yemen after mistakenly adding the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Waltz’s Yemen group chat wasn’t the only Signal chat where sensitive plans were being discussed.
Waltz is rumored to be losing support from President Donald Trump over the scandal, but Trump has also demonstrated a lack of understanding in his public comments. During one recent White House press conference, a reporter asked Trump if Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s job was in danger. Trump wondered why anyone would ask about Hegseth since he “had nothing to do with” the snafu. But Hegseth wasn’t just involved, he was the one who appeared to share the most sensitive information in the Signal group chat texts that were made public by the Atlantic, including the types of planes that were being deployed and when.
The New York Times reports that Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles met with President Trump last Wednesday to discuss whether Waltz should lose his job, but ultimately decided to keep him on. It’s not clear whether this latest article from the Post about Waltz’s use of Gmail will cause Trump to reconsider, but that seems dependent upon whether the story breaks through at Fox News. The president is infamous for watching a lot of TV and will often tweet his thoughts on TV news coverage on his social media platform Truth Social. The amount of TV coverage a given topic gets often determines whether Trump will act. Trump seemed reluctant to pull the nomination of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General until Fox News wouldn’t stop harping on the story.
The use of insecure email accounts by top Trump officials is ironic, of course, given the fact that Trump made information security such a central part of his 2016 presidential campaign. His opponent, Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton, used a private server for some of her work as Secretary of State, something that Trump often said she should get tossed in jail for. Waltz himself has criticized Democrats for not being careful with classified material.
“Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account,” Waltz tweeted in June 2023. “And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing.”
It seems unlikely that Waltz is going to advocate for charges to be brought against himself.
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