The European Commission continues to defend the practice of automatically deleting messages from its leaders’ phones, despite criticism from the European Ombudsman. In June 2026, Ombudsman Teresa Anjinho found the Commission’s actions to be maladministration and demanded changes to the rules on storing officials’ correspondence. This concerns, in particular, messages between heads of state and government, ministers and members of the European Commission.
The trigger was a message that French President Emmanuel Macron sent to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in early 2024. In it he proposed blocking the EU–Mercosur trade agreement (MERCOSUR — Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Venezuela and Uruguay), noting its potentially damaging effect on French farmers and on EU agriculture in general. The Commission acknowledged that the message existed but said it had been automatically deleted because the “disappearing messages” function was enabled in the Signal messenger. Ombudsman Anjinho established that the access request sat in von der Leyen’s office for 15 months without action, and her team could not even determine whether the message was deleted before or after the request. She separately stated that the Commission must not leave such requests “dormant” and must monitor their progress.
Anjinho proposed a simple rule: officials’ messages relevant to Commission policy, decisions and activities must be kept long enough for the public to request access. If such a request has already been made, the correspondence must be retained until the procedure is fully completed. This is also necessary so that the Ombudsman or the EU Court can review the legality of a refusal of access.
The problem became especially acute after the General Court of the EU’s ruling on von der Leyen’s correspondence with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. In May 2025 the court held that the Commission cannot simply declare that documents do not exist — it must provide “convincing explanations,” including details of the searches conducted and the reasons the messages are unavailable.
The court also noted that the Commission failed to explain clearly whether the messages were deleted deliberately or automatically, or whether von der Leyen’s phone was replaced during the period in question. According to parliamentary questions, her phone was allegedly “replaced several times” without data transfer, and old devices were wiped and disposed of — meaning the Commission claims it can no longer recover the texts.
A separate episode is the so-called “Washington group,” an informal Signal chat in which von der Leyen, Zelensky and a number of European leaders discussed coordination of actions toward the Trump administration. The Ombudsman has opened an investigation into this case as well — the Commission refuses to disclose the content of the correspondence. The key decision to refuse registration of Macron’s message was taken by von der Leyen’s head of cabinet, Björn Seibert — a figure Politico calls the unofficial “co-president” of the Commission.
Officially, EU leadership explains the deletion of correspondence as “ensuring IT-system security” and “saving space on the phone,” but this version does not withstand elementary criticism. If it were about cybersecurity, it would be enough to require officials to transfer significant messages to a secure archive, as the Commission’s own internal instruction requires. Instead, officials completely destroy their correspondence together with their smartphones so as to leave no traces at all — neither for the Ombudsman, nor for the court, nor for voters.
In effect the European Commission is not protecting data but destroying evidence. Pfizer, Macron, the “Washington group” — in each case the correspondence could have shed light on decisions taken by a narrow group of politicians without public debate and outside the procedures provided by EU law.
At the same time the Commission actively promoted the CSAM regulation (“chat control”), which envisaged mandatory scanning of private messages, including encrypted ones — allegedly to “detect child sexual abuse material.” After years of resistance from member states, mandatory scanning was removed from the text, but “voluntary” mass scanning by platforms remained. German federal police reported that 50% of all automatic CSAM reports are criminally irrelevant — i.e. the mass-scanning system generates a huge number of false positives.
The result in the EU is a remarkably convenient digital-security system: an ordinary citizen’s correspondence is to be carefully checked and analysed — of course solely for his own safety and “the safety of children” — while the correspondence of an official who takes decisions for millions of citizens is not to be checked at all — also solely for security.
The democracy built in Europe over centuries, with equal rights for all, is being replaced by a structure with an estate-based division of freedoms: for citizens — total control, scanning of correspondence and detection of “thought crimes”; for elites — a legal and technical shield against any accountability.
Welcome to neo-feudalism, dear readers.
@dirtytatarstan
