Members of President Donald Trump's National Security Council, including National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, used personal Gmail accounts for official government business, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
Internal emails show that a senior aide to Waltz used Gmail to discuss sensitive topics, including U.S. military positions and weapons systems, with officials from other departments who used government accounts. Waltz himself received work documents, including his schedule, in his personal email and occasionally copied text into Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to coordinate meetings.
Cybersecurity experts say the use of commercial email services by high-ranking national security officials — especially for potentially sensitive or time-limited information — is a serious vulnerability. Such platforms lack the end-to-end encryption and enhanced security found in government communications systems like JWICS.
"Unless you are using GPG, email is not end-to-end encrypted, and the contents of a message can be intercepted and read at many points," says Eva Galperin, cybersecurity director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Including on Google’s email servers."
National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes denied that Waltz used a personal email account to receive classified material. "Waltz has not sent and will not send classified information from a public account," Hughes said.
But the revelations come amid broader criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of classified information. Waltz recently found himself embroiled in a scandal after accidentally adding Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group chat about an upcoming U.S. strike in Yemen — a conversation that included real-time information about military targets, weapons platforms, and intelligence provided by Israel. The leak reportedly frustrated Israeli officials, who were upset that their surveillance capabilities were becoming public knowledge.
Although Trump publicly defended Waltz, the possibility of firing him was discussed in a closed-door meeting last week with Vice President J.D. Vance and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Ultimately, Trump decided to keep Waltz in the job — in part, senior officials said, to avoid handing a political victory to the "liberal media."
"This incident badly damaged Waltz," one official said. "But the president didn't want to give Jeffrey Goldberg a scalp."
Waltz claims that the journalist's inclusion in the Signal chat was accidental, saying that Goldberg's contact "somehow ended up on my phone." But Goldberg has denied this, saying that they had met before and that Waltz's explanation is false. A photo recently surfaced showing the two men at the same diplomatic event.
"I take full responsibility. I started the group," Waltz told Fox News. But critics point to his past statements condemning the use of private email for official work — including his calls in 2023 for the Justice Department to indict Hillary Clinton on her email server — as evidence of hypocrisy.
Despite the controversy, Trump has continued to stand by his national security adviser. "I don't fire people because of fake news and witch hunts," he said Sunday. Still, officials acknowledge that the administration is privately shocked by the breach.
"This is not just a technical error," said one senior official. "This is a trust issue — and it's not going anywhere."