Trump says Signal chat isn't 'really an FBI thing.' The FBI has a long
history of such inquiries
[March 27, 2025]
By ERIC TUCKER
WASHINGTON (AP) — FBI Director Kash Patel was not part of a Signal chat
in which other Trump administration national security officials
discussed detailed attack plans, but that didn't spare him from being
questioned by lawmakers this week about whether the nation's premier law
enforcement agency would investigate.
Patel made no such commitments during the course of two days of Senate
and House hearings. Instead, he testified that he had not personally
reviewed the text messages that were inadvertently shared with the
editor-in-chief for The Atlantic who was mistakenly included on an
unclassified Signal chat.
That Patel would be grilled on what the FBI might do was hardly
surprising.
Even as President Donald Trump insisted "it's not really an FBI thing,”
the reality is that the FBI and Justice Department for decades have been
responsible for enforcing Espionage Act statutes governing the
mishandling — whether intentional or negligent — of national defense
information like the kind shared on Signal, a publicly available app
that provides encrypted communications but is not approved for
classified information.
The Justice Department has broad discretion to open an investigation,
though it remains unclear whether Attorney General Pam Bondi, who
introduced Trump at a Justice Department event this month, would
authorize such an inquiry. Trump administration officials insist that
the details shared were not classified, though the Espionage Act
technically criminalizes the mishandling of any information deemed to be
closely held national defense information even if not classified.
Multiple high-profile figures have found themselves under investigation
in recent years over their handling of government secrets, but the
differences in the underlying facts and the outcomes make it impossible
to prognosticate what might happen in this instance or whether any
accountability can be expected. There's also precedent for public
officials either to avoid criminal charges or be spared meaningful
punishment.
“In terms of prior investigations, there were set-out standards that the
department always looked at and tried to follow when making
determinations about which types of disclosures they were going to
pursue,” said former Justice Department prosecutor Michael Zweiback, who
has handled classified information investigations.
Those factors include the sensitivity of the information exposed and the
willfulness of the conduct.
A look at just a few of the notable prior investigations:
Hillary Clinton
The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee was investigated but not
charged for her use of a private email server for the sake of
convenience during her time as secretary of state in the Obama
administration. There appear to be some parallels with the Signal chat
episode.
The politically fraught criminal investigation was initiated by a 2015
referral from the intelligence agencies’ internal watchdog, which
alerted the FBI to the presence of potentially hundreds of emails
containing classified information on that server. Law enforcement then
set out to determine whether Clinton, or her aides, had transmitted
classified information on a server not meant to host such material.
The overall conclusions were something of a mixed bag.
Then-FBI Director James Comey, in a highly unusual public statement,
asserted that the bureau had found evidence that Clinton was “extremely
careless” in her handling of classified information but recommended
against charges because he said officials could not prove that she
intended to break the law or knew that the information she and her aides
were communicating about was classified.
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FBI Director Kash Patel, joined at right by Director of National
Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, answers questions as the Senate
Intelligence Committee holds its worldwide threats hearing, on
Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 25, 2025. (AP Photo/J.
Scott Applewhite)
The decision was derided by Republicans who thought the Obama
administration Justice Department had let a fellow Democrat off the
hook. Among those critical were some of the very same participants
in the Signal chat as well as Bondi, who as Florida's attorney
general spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention and
mimicked the audience chant of “Lock her up!”
David Petraeus
Among the biggest names to actually get charged is David Petraeus,
the former CIA director sentenced in 2015 to two years' probation
for disclosing classified information to a biographer with whom he
was having an extramarital affair.
That material consisted of eight binders of classified information
that Petraeus improperly kept in his house from his time as the top
military commander in Afghanistan. Among the secret details in the
“black books” were the names of covert operatives, the coalition war
strategy and notes about Petraeus’ discussions with President Barack
Obama and the National Security Council, prosecutors have said.
Petraeus, a retired four-star Army general who led U.S. forces in
Iraq and Afghanistan, wound up pleading guilty to a single
misdemeanor count of unauthorized retention and removal of
classified material as part of a deal with Justice Department
prosecutors. Some national security experts said it smacked of a
double-standard for its lenient outcome.
Comey himself would later complain about the resolution, writing in
a 2018 book that he argued to the Justice Department that Petraeus
should have also been charged with a felony for lying to the FBI.
“A poor person, an unknown person — say a young black Baptist
minister from Richmond — would be charged with a felony and sent to
jail,” he said.
Jeffrey Sterling
A former CIA officer, Sterling was convicted of leaking to a
reporter details of a secret mission to thwart Iran’s nuclear
ambitions by slipping flawed nuclear blueprints to the Iranians
through a Russian intermediary.
He was sentenced in 2015 to 3 1/2 years in prison, a punishment
whistleblower advocates and other supporters decried as impossible
to square with Petraeus' misdemeanor guilty plea just a month
earlier.
The details of the operation disclosed by Sterling were published by
journalist James Risen in his 2006 book “State of War.”
Sterling was charged in 2010, but the trial was delayed for years,
in part because of legal wrangling about whether Risen could be
forced to testify. Ultimately, prosecutors chose not to call Risen
as a witness, despite winning legal battles allowing them to do so.
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