The US Treasury Department was initially alone in providing the court a timeline of the messages that it was able to retrieve. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had received a preservation memo on March 26, his acting general counsel said, as well as advice regarding his fundamental duty to preserve records. Resultingly, "images were taken from the phones of Secretary Bessent and Mr. [Daniel] Katz," Bessent’s chief of staff. The messages begin at 1:48 pm EST on March 15, 2025.

"The Atlantic article was about a chat that took place the 11th through the 15th,” Anthony says, “so pretty much everything was gone—from the only defendant who gave us clear and specific information about what they were able to save.”

The Department of Defense told the court last month that its attorneys were "in the process" of complying with the agency's preservation rules, and that Secretary Hegseth's communications team had been asked to forward the Signal messages to an official DoD account. Pressed by the court for further details last week, DoD said Monday that a search of Hegseth's device had been conducted "on or about March 27," adding that screenshots of the "existing Signal application messages" had been preserved.

American Oversight’s lawyers had urged the court to seek greater specificity, arguing