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In order to allow a Republican president (aka Donald Trump) to hit the ground running, the Heritage Foundation not only put together Project 2025, its 900-page playbook on how to dismantle the government, but also produced a series of instructional videos for political appointees.

These videos are meant to ensure that even political novices can effectively do their jobs without running afoul of the law or creating embarrassing situations for the president that could distract from his core mission of turning the US into a right-wing utopia.

Novices like Pete Hegseth, a TV show host who not only found himself in charge of the Department of Defense, its $800 billion budget, and its millions of civilian and military employees, but also at the center of a major scandal.

The Pentagon chief was part of a high-level chat group that included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and various other senior White House and national security officials, as well as the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who was inadvertently added without anybody noticing that he was not supposed to be there.

Using the Signal app, the top administration officials discussed an attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Hegseth at one point shared details of an imminent strike.

The White House maintains that this information was not classified, and that therefore no laws were broken and nobody needs to be fired.

However, government ethics experts pointed out that the use of Signal, a chat app that allows the automatic deletion of messages, at a minimum violated federal recordkeeping laws that require the retention of official communications, e.g., those involving senior government officials including the vice president discussing military strikes.

And this is precisely why the people behind Project 2025 warned against the use of Signal (specifically) and other such apps (in general) in their training videos, which were obtained by ProPublica.

In one of them, titled “Oversight and Investigations,” three experts weigh in on these recordkeeping requirements and what appointees have to look out for.

“All the agencies under the federal government are governed by certain records retention policies. You have to be careful with whatever agency you’re working at, that you’re following those policies,” explained Michael Ding, who was an attorney at the America First Legal Foundation at the time. “That’s another way that political appointees get into trouble sometimes, is they’re using these encrypted chat platforms or self-deleting messages, and they are, in some sense, violating the law by deleting those.”

To their credit, the Heritage Foundation experts are saying that this is important specifically so that these records can be retained and requested.

“If you are conducting official business, whatever communication was transmitted to conduct that official business, that’s a federal record and it needs to be properly retained so that somebody can request it under [the Freedom of Information Act],” Ding added.

At that point, Tom Jones, the founder of the American Accountability Foundation, jumped in to point out that taxpayers have a right to expect government officials to play by the rules.

“At the end of the day, the taxpayer is paying you to do this work, and the taxpayer should be expected to get this information back from you, and you shouldn’t be able to get out from under it because you stuck it in a Hotmail account,” he said.

Of course, it is possible (and perhaps even likely) that all of the members of the “Houthi PC small group” were acutely aware of these recordkeeping requirements and chose to communicate via Signal specifically to sidestep them.

One thing seems certain. The fact that none of these high-level government officials ever raised the issue of Signal not being the appropriate channel for this conversation indicates that this form of communication is commonplace in the Trump administration.

Which begs the question: What else is the administration trying to hide?

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.