The Atlantic Gift Article: The State Department told a court last year that the secretary didn’t use disappearing messages. By this spring, it had dropped that claim.Secretary of State Marco Rubio, like most federal officials, is legally required to retain records that he creates as part of his job. So it was no surprise that his office ended up in court last year after The Atlantic revealed that he had participated in an auto-deleting Signal chat about war plans in Yemen with other top national-security officials. In a case involving a Freedom of Information Act request for the Signal records on Rubio’s phone, a federal judge wanted assurances that these documents had been preserved. Rubio’s team told the court that his government phone was equipped on July 21, 2025, with software called LeapXpert that automatically preserved from Signal “all messages sent or received, regardless of whether the sender configures a message to ‘auto-delete.’” Seven weeks later, in another declaration to the court, the State Department went further. “Secretary Rubio does not use the auto-deletion functions in third party messaging applications when sending communications that may include federal records,” Susan Weetman, a senior adviser for the department’s Information Access Programs Directorate, told the court on September 9. But that denial, written in the present tense, was less than it seemed. About two months later, Rubio changed the settings in a Signal chat about administration matters with other senior officials so that the messages would automatically delete after a set amount of time, a person familiar with the exchange told us, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to share the information. When we reached out to the State Department for comment, the official who responded contested the idea that Rubio has made a practice of turning on disappearing messages but said that he could not address the specific instance. The State Department told us that Signal continues to be an approved communication application, that LeapXpert is installed on the government phones of some officials, and that the department remains committed to full compliance with record-keeping laws. “These measures support compliance even when users adjust application settings, including the Signal app’s ‘disappearing messages’ setting,” the department official told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address agency regulations.The department did not answer questions about why Rubio would decide to activate disappearing messages if his phone contained software that ensured those messages could not be fully deleted…”