Senior members of the Trump administration’s National Security Council — including its top national security adviser, Michael Waltz — used Gmail to conduct government business, The Washington Post reported, citing documents and three unnamed government officials.
The report follows last week’s news that several cabinet-level officials, including the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, discussed highly sensitive war plans in a Signal group chat that also inadvertently included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
Per the Washington Post, an aide to Waltz used the consumer version of Gmail, which is not cleared for government use, to discuss “highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies involving sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict.”
As for the national security adviser himself, Waltz had “less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information” sent to his personal Gmail account, such as schedules and work documents, the report cited the officials as saying.
According to the Post, the officials described the national security adviser’s use of personal Gmail accounts as “problematic handling” of information.
A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately return a request for comment on the report.
Hackers, including those backed by nation states, frequently target the personal Gmail accounts of government officials with phishing attacks to obtain and steal information. In 2019, Microsoft found that Iran-backed hackers were targeting the personal email accounts associated with Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign. Security researchers later found evidence that China was targeting the personal accounts of Biden presidential campaign staff during the 2020 election.
In 2012, former CIA chief David Petraeus was found to have used a shared Gmail account to share draft messages with his biographer, with whom he was having an affair. Petraeus was spared jail after later pleading guilty to improperly retaining highly sensitive information in eight notebooks that he gave to the biographer.
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