- House Speaker Mike Johnson said he doesn’t use Signal, an encrypted messaging app.
- “A lot of them text,” Johnson said of his GOP colleagues. “That’s our main means of communication.”
- He jokes that his texts are “probably being monitored by the Russians.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Wednesday that he doesn’t use Signal, telling an interviewer that he’s in “zero” chats on the encrypted messaging app.
Instead, Johnson said, he primarily communicates via regular text messages.
“I get about 400 a day literally just from members,” Johnson said at an Axios News Shapers event in Washington, DC. “A lot of them text. That’s our main means of communication.”
He added, jokingly: “Probably being monitored by the Russians, for all I know.”
Signal is an popular messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption to keep text messages secure, preventing third parties — including foreign governments — from being able to read messages.
While Apple’s iMessage also uses end-to-end encryption, regular SMS text messages are generally not encrypted, leaving them vulnerable to hacking.
Signal was at the center of a recent scandal in Washington, when Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a chat on the platform in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, and other Trump administration officials discussed upcoming strikes in Yemen.
Trump recently discouraged members of his administration from using the app following the incident.
“If you want to know the truth. I would frankly tell these people not to use Signal, although it’s been used by a lot of people,” Trump told The Atlantic. “But, whatever it is, whoever has it, whoever owns it, I wouldn’t want to use it.”
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