A watchdog group has said the exchanges on the Signal app were federal records, and sued in an effort to preserve them.
All of the messages from a leaked group chat have been deleted from the phone of John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, the agency said in a court filing.
Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, created a chat group and invited cabinet members and their aides to discuss the administration’s plans to strike Houthi militia targets in Yemen last month. But Mr. Waltz inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, who eventually published the texts.
Democrats and other critics have said that the officials in the chat on the commercial app Signal revealed classified and sensitive information, including the times U.S. airstrikes were being launched from ships. Testifying before Congress last month, Mr. Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said that the information was not classified.
The watchdog group American Oversight said the messages were federal records and sued in an effort to preserve the chats.
In court papers filed on Monday, Hurley V. Blankenship, the C.I.A.’s chief data officer, declared that he had reviewed screenshots from Mr. Ratcliffe’s account. But he said only “residual administrative content” remained, including the name of the chat, the “Houthi PC small group.”
“The screenshot,” Mr. Blankenship said, “does not include substantive messages from the Signal chat.”