Signal Chat Disclosure Poses Early Test for F.B.I. and Justice Dept.

In years past, the move by senior members of President 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 F.B.I. and the Justice Department’s national security division.

Yet so far, neither the attorney general, Pam Bondi, nor the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, appear to be planning to investigate whether the communications described in a bombshell report in The Atlantic magazine on 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 on Tuesday.

What Ms. Bondi and Mr. 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 Mr. Trump during the Biden administration.

“This is something that would normally be investigated by the F.B.I. and D.O.J.,” 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,” Ms. McCord said.

The F.B.I. 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, Mr. Trump appeared to acknowledge the inquiry underway by the National Security Council but quickly added, “It’s not really an F.B.I. thing.”

The Justice Department and F.B.I. work independently, but in tandem on such investigations: Only after the bureau concluded its inquiry would department officials determine whether charges were warranted.

Mr. Patel, speaking at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, said he had been briefed on the matter, but did not say whether the bureau would open a formal investigation. An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment.

A spokesman for Ms. 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, Representative Dan Goldman, Democrat of New York, called on Ms. Bondi to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Signal group, arguing that her status as a member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet made it impossible for her “to conduct an investigation without the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

The Justice Department, under Ms. 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, Mr. 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. Ms. Bondi was apparently not invited.

The dilemma faced by Ms. Bondi and Mr. Patel, both outspoken surrogates for Mr. Trump during the 2024 campaign, has added importance given their maximalist approach to punishing political adversaries found to have improperly handled national security secrets.

Both Ms. Bondi and Mr. 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,” Mr. Patel wrote in his book “Government Gangsters,” published in 2023.

In one of her first appearances on the national political stage, in 2016, Ms. 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!” Ms. 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-D.O.D. messaging systems” and “unclassified systems, government-issued or otherwise, for classified national security information.”

At a hearing Tuesday, Ms. Gabbard said she did not believe the information shared in the messages was classified. The C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, argued that Mr. Hegseth has said the information was not classified, though he added that he had no way of verifying Mr. Hegseth’s claims.

Mr. Trump also echoed those claims at the White House on Tuesday.

But former officials who handled highly sensitive information said the reported description of military targets, weapons to be used, and the sequence and timing of the strikes on Houthi sites discussed in the group chat would likely involve classified material, whether it was marked that way or not.

It is not clear whether those assertions by Mr. Trump’s national security officials matter. Under the 1917 Espionage Act, sensitive information does not have to be classified for its mishandling to be a crime. The law was written before the modern classified information system, and instead covers closely held defense information that could hurt the United States or aid a foreign adversary if disclosed.

Still, in the modern era, such information is usually classified, and it is rare — but not unheard-of — for the Justice Department to prosecute people for mishandling nonclassified information.

Former prosecutors said a decision not to investigate, let alone bring charges, could give future defendants in leak cases a basis to claim that they were being selectively prosecuted.

The claims by members of the Signal chat — that no classified information had been shared — have echoes of the defense mounted by Mrs. Clinton’s team, which maintained that information in emails on her private server was not marked classified and that much of it was derived from publicly available sources. Subsequent investigation found that a handful of messages had some markings indicating the lowest form of classification.

F.B.I. agents who reviewed the evidence disagreed with the arguments made by Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers, noting that the information, while overwhelmingly not marked classified, was by its very nature classified because it discussed sensitive issues.

Evidence in the case included email chains that discussed coming U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, a highly classified national security program.

The Clinton team tried to downplay the severity of the investigation, calling it a security review. But it was, in fact, a serious criminal investigation. At the time, the F.B.I. began examining the emails after receiving a referral from the intelligence community’s inspector general.

Mr. Goldberg’s description of the material included in the Signal chat — which he described as a “war plan” against the Houthis — suggests that at least some of the information being discussed was comparably sensitive.

Revealing such plans before a strike might have endangered American troops. Former F.B.I. officials who have worked on leak cases described this as a devastating breach of national security, and former national security officials said that if personal cellphones were used it might have exposed participants to continuing hacking efforts by the Chinese and Russians. Reports show that at least one of the participants was in Moscow at the time.

Other conversations in the group chat could also be considered classified because they involved internal U.S. officials’ assessments of relations with foreign countries, specifically in Europe. Such discussions, when they occur within government channels, are often considered classified.

Mr. Patel had campaigned for Mr. Trump, promising to restore the F.B.I.’s reputation, which he believed had been damaged by investigations into Mr. Trump, including one that relied upon the Espionage Act.

In “Government Gangsters,” Mr. Patel wrote: “If people in authority face no consequences when they break the rules, then they will break the rules. Worse, when people are encouraged to break the rules, they will break them again and again.”

Eric Schmitt and Robert Jimison contributed reporting.