Attorney General Pam Bondi avoids questions about investigating Signal chat

In what appear to be her first public remarks on the matter, Attorney General Pam Bondi dodged questions Thursday about whether the Justice Department will investigate senior Trump administration officials for their use of an unclassified messaging app to discuss detailed plans for an air attack in Yemen this month.

But she pushed back on the notion that those communications were classified, adopting an argument echoed by President Donald Trump, and sought to shift focus to Democrats, whom Trump has long criticized for their handling of sensitive information.

“It was sensitive information - not classified,” Bondi said of the communications among top national security officials on the messaging app Signal. She called the public release of their conversation after the editor of the Atlantic magazine was mistakenly added to the chat “inadvertent.”

“What we should be talking about is, it was a very successful mission,” Bondi said, speaking to reporters at a news conference at an FBI office in Manassas, Virginia, where she and other top Justice Department officials announced the arrest of whom they claimed to be an MS-13 gang

“If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton’s home that she was trying to BleachBit,” she said, referring to software used to delete computer files. “Talk about the classified documents in Joe Biden’s garage that Hunter Biden had access to.”

The Justice Department and FBI investigated Clinton and Biden over those incidents, though no charges were ever brought. But so far, Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have offered no indication that they intend to pursue similar probes against the officials involved in the Signal chat.

Asked during a congressional hearing Wednesday whether the FBI was investigating the matter, Patel declined to comment.