When the telephone of the director of the Central Agency John Ratcliffe was reviewed last month to preserve the messages of his signal application, a CIA official could not locate any “substantive message”, instead, he only found the name of the chat and changed to the application configuration, according to a sworn presentation presented in the court on Monday night.
Hurley Blankenship, Data Director of the CIA, told a federal judge to supervise a lawsuit that defies the use of the signal that he could only recover “residual administrative content” of the Ratcliffe personal signal account.
The director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, testifies to a select intelligence committee of the House of Representatives on “World Threats”, in Capitol Hill in Washington, on March 26, 2025.
DREW ANGERER/AFP through Getty Images
“I used that terminology because the screenshot does not include substantive messages of the signal chat; rather, it captures the name of the chat, ‘small group of the Houthi PC’, and reflects administrative notifications of March 26 and March 28 related to the changes in the administrative environments of the participants in this group chat, as profile names and message configurations,” Blankenship wrote.
The statement occurs after the American Superight Defense Group raised concerns that the configuration of the phones of some officials could have triggered the messages for self -election despite a federal requirement to keep the communications.
The officials were able to successfully preserve the devices of the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, according to sworn presentations.
-ABC News’ Peter Charalambous
