A federal judge has instructed the Trump administration to keep all the information from the chats where key national security officials communicated using the Signal app.
military strikes
as they occurred earlier this month in Yemen.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has instructed the senior Cabinet members mentioned in a lawsuit filed by the government watchdog organization American Oversight to keep all communications sent and received via Signal from March 11 through March 15.
Benjamin Sparks, an attorney for American Oversight, expressed worries that “these messages face an immediate risk of deletion” because Signal has features allowing automatic message erasure. This prompted Judge Boasberg to request that the Trump administration submit a verified statement by Monday to guarantee the preservation of these communications.
ADDITIONAL: Ex-intelligence officers claim Signal chats exposed service members to danger
The legal action — which lists Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the National Archives as defendants — seeks a court ruling from a federal judge declaring the utilization of Signal illegal. It also demands an injunction requiring these officials to safeguard all relevant documents promptly since Signal’s message deletion feature contravenes government regulations concerning record retention.
The utilization of the Signal group chat was
revealed Monday
By The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who mentioned he had been mistakenly included in the conversation when top national security figures like Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz were talking about the military mission.
Based on the images of the Signal messages shared by The Atlantic, these messages were designed to vanish after a specific period. Initially, they were configured to expire after seven days. However, as shown in the screenshots from the publication, following Hegseth’s transmission of the initial operational report on March 15th, the settings for message disappearance were adjusted to occur after twenty-eight days.
Judge Boasberg has temporarily refused to require administration officials to reveal whether Signal was utilized by the Trump administration in a broader sense.
“At this stage, I wouldn’t feel ready to issue such an order,” he stated.
On the heels of Trump early Thursday accusing Boasberg on social media of “grabbing the ‘Trump Cases’ all to himself,” the judge began the hearing by providing a detailed description of the D.C. District Court’s automated system for assigning cases, including how each judge is allotted “electronic cards” to ensure cases are fairly distributed.
“That’s how it works, and that’s how all cases continue to be assigned in this course,” Judge Boasberg said.
Boasberg earlier this month
temporarily blocked
Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 200 alleged gang members to El Salvador without due process, leading the White House to call for his impeachment and publicly attack him as a “Democrat activist” and a “radical left lunatic.”
Lawyers for the Department of Defense, prior to Thursday’s hearing, filed a declaration stating that they have requested that a copy of the Signal messages in question be forwarded to an official DOD account so they can be preserved.
A subsequent statement issued by an attorney representing the Treasury Department indicated that both Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his chief of staff have kept hold of every communication starting with the messages sent by Mike Waltz on March 15th.
Trump and other leading figures in the administration have
downplayed
The utilization of Signal for discussing the assault, with the claim that no classified details were disclosed during the conversation, even though the discussion covered aspects related to the weaponry employed and the scheduling of the attacks.
