A top aide to Kristi Noem and her rumored lover Corey Lewandowski erased nearly 30 secret Signal chats involving the pair on the very day he walked out of the Trump administration, according to court documents reviewed by PunchUp.
Joseph Guy, the former deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, wiped the FEMA-related group chats—with 20 participants in all, which, sources have told the Daily Beast’s new sister investigations Substack, included Noem, 54, and her chief adviser Lewandowski, 52—from his personal phone at the end of April.
At the time, the pair were engulfed in a fast-spreading scandal over how contracts were handed out on their watch. The deletions landed just weeks after the department’s own inspector general opened a probe into those contracts.
A week before Guy’s messages were deleted, NBC News had reported that Lewandowski solicited payments from government contractors in exchange for favorable treatment. He denies it and has demanded a retraction. The story remains live and unaltered.
House Democrats had already accused Noem of misleading Congress under oath. She told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Lewandowski played no role in approving contracts. Democrats said the evidence flatly contradicted that, according to their joint letter to DHS. The March 18 letter warned that shredding any Lewandowski-related records would be treated as destruction of evidence.
Guy disclosed the deletions himself, under oath, at his May 4 deposition, PunchUp reported. Ordered to unlock his phone and read out his group chats, he revealed nearly 30 FEMA-related Signal threads sitting on it.
His account, laid out in a preservation order from Clinton appointee Judge Susan Illston, is that on April 30 or May 1, he tried to reinstall Signal, which wiped the messages and their backups. April 30 was his last day on the federal payroll. The judge said she was “seriously troubled by these allegations of spoliation.”
Days earlier, after being ordered to hand the phone to Justice Department lawyers, Guy instead ran his own search—using only the words “renewal, core, and staffing plan”—and reported finding nothing. Illston ruled that self-search was unauthorized and that the terms were “underinclusive.” Then, on his telling, the app was reinstalled, and the chats vanished.
Guy fought to dodge the witness chair altogether. He hired lawyers from Binnall Law Group and raced to a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia to kill the subpoena. His filing argued that surrendering his phone breached his Fourth Amendment rights. Illston called the constitutional argument “frivolous” and ruled that leaving government “should not shield him from discovery.”
Signal can be set to quietly erase messages, potentially binning records the government is legally required to keep. DHS had circulated a letter ordering staff to “only use DHS devices for official business.”
There is no suggestion that Noem or Lewandowski knew about Guy’s deletions. Guy’s lawyers at Binnall Law Group—the Trumpworld firm whose founder, Jesse Binnall, represents FBI director Kash Patel and other administration figures—told PunchUp: “Mr. Guy never intentionally deleted the messages at issue.”
They emphatically denied that he discussed deleting messages with Noem, Lewandowski, or anyone linked to them. “Any assertion to the contrary is a lie,” the spokesperson said.
The deletions have already cost the government, PunchUp reports. Illston ruled that the destroyed evidence helped sink its bid to keep FEMA staffing plans secret, because so little proof survives elsewhere. She gave DHS and FEMA until last Monday to hand over those plans—and slapped down the administration’s attempt to kill the case.
The wipeout is the latest scandal to stain Noem and Lewandowski’s 15-month DHS reign, says PunchUp. Trump, 80, fired Noem on March 5 and parked her in a made-up “Shield of the Americas” envoy job—a role the outlet revealed in April was invented to keep her out of the Senate race. Guy was one of 10 loyalists who trailed her out the door.
Noem and Lewandowski have long denied an affair, with Noem telling Congress the claims were “tabloid garbage.”
The Daily Beast contacted the White House, which referred it to DHS, FEMA, the Justice Department, and a representative for Noem and Lewandowski.
Noem and Lewandowski were asked directly whether their own Signal messages about FEMA have been preserved and if they had been aware at any point of Guy’s deletion. They did not respond.
DHS did not address the deletions, with a spokesperson saying it was “unfortunate this lawsuit persists” and describing the case as an attempt “to abuse the legal system.” A FEMA spokesperson said the agency did not comment on pending litigation.
Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.
