Senior Aide of Kristi Noem & Corey Lewandowski Deliberately Destroyed Court Evidence

Photo Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Getty A senior official to Kristi Noem deliberately destroyed messages during a federal court battle over sweeping job cuts to its disaster response agency, a judge has found.

Karen Evans, one of the ousted Department of Homeland Security chief’s most trusted aides, was found to have taken steps to delete potentially crucial correspondence from the messaging app Signal—just a day after staff were reminded to preserve them, PunchUp has reported .

In a September 11 ruling , Judge Susan Ilston said that Evans, a former acting Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) chief, had acted with “intent to deprive” plaintiffs of correspondence relevant to their case against measures to downsize the agency.

Ilston’s bombshell finding comes two months after PunchUp revealed that another top Noem aide had wiped nearly 30 secret chats involving the former DHS Secretary and her chief aide and rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski, who has been accused of widespread corruption during his time at the agency.

The court previously found senior officials had conducted government business involving Noem, 54, and Lewandowski, 52, through Signal on personal phones, with disappearing-message settings causing communications to vanish.

But Illston, a Clinton appointee, has found that Evans went further, the Daily Beast’s sister Substack reported on Monday.

On March 11, six days after Donald Trump fired Noem, Evans shortened the auto-delete timer on a Signal group called “FEMA 2.0”—which included fellow senior officials Joseph Guy and Kara Voorhies—from four weeks to just one.

Illston found that Evans’s conduct went “beyond gross negligence.” The judge had already ordered discovery from FEMA leadership at the time of Evans’s move, the ruling states.

The messages concerned the bitter battle over a massive reduction in FEMA staffing numbers.

A coalition of federal employee unions, public-interest organizations, and local governments brought the case, challenging the Trump administration’s decision.

The ruling states: “Taking into account all of the circumstantial evidence, including officials’ continued use of the Signal auto-delete setting even after this Court ordered the production of relevant FEMA communications, the Court concludes that at least Evans deleted Signal chats with the intent to deprive plaintiffs of the use of the chats in this litigation.” The destruction of the messages has had major consequences for the ongoing court battle.

Ilston has barred the Trump administration from relying on hindsight testimony that denied its plan to slash FEMA staffing.

She also ruled that the missing Signal messages would be presumed unfavorable to the government.