A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to preserve the content of the chat in which the senior national security officials used the signal application to discuss military attacks in Yemen as they were carried out earlier this month.
The United States District Judge, James Boasberg, ordered the senior cabinet officials appointed in a lawsuit by the Government Transparency Group, US supervision of the supervision of the messages sent and received on the signal between March 11 and March 15.
Benjamin Sparks, a lawyer who represents US supervision, expressed concern that “these messages are in imminent danger of destruction” due to the configuration within the signal that can be established to eliminate messages automatically, which leads Judge Boasberg to order the Trump administration file a affidavit this Monday to ensure that the messages are kept.
The Lawsuit – Which Names Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Besent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the National Archives as Defandants – Asked to Federal Judge to declare the use of signal a Government Use and Order The Cabinet Members to Preserve The Records Immedialy, As Signal’s Deleting of Messages Violates Governmental Record-Keeping Requirements.
The use of the chat of the signal group was revealed Monday by the chief editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who said that he was unnoticed to the chat when the senior national security officials, including Hegseth and the national security advisor Mike Waltz, were discussing the military operation.
According to the screenshots of the signal messages published by the Atlantic, the messages disappeared after a certain period of time. Originally, the messages disappeared after a week. Then, according to the screenshots of the messages published by the magazine, on March 15, after Hegseth sent the first operational update, the messages disappeared after four weeks.
Judge Boasberg declined, for now, to order the administration officials to reveal if the Trump administration had used the signal in a broader context.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth talks to the media when he reaches the joint base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu on March 24, 2025.
Petty Officer 1st Class John Bel/Usndo-Pacific Command
“I don’t believe at this point that this is something that would be prepared to order,” he said.
Boasberg at the beginning of this month temporarily blocked the use of Trump of the Alien Enemies Law to deport more than 200 alleged members of migrant gangs to El Salvador without due process, which led the White House to ask for its dismissal and publicly attack it as a “Democratic activist” and a “lunatic left radical.”
Immediately after Trump accused Boasberg on the social networks of “grabbing the ‘Trump cases’ for himself”, the judge began Thursday’s hearing by providing a detailed description of the automated system of the DC district court to assign cases, including the way in which each judge is assigned “electronic cards” to ensure that the cases are distributed a lot.
“This is how it works, and this is how all cases are being assigned in this course,” Judge Boasberg said.
The lawyers of the Department of Defense, before Thursday’s hearing, presented a statement that indicated that they have requested that a copy of the signal messages in question be sent to an official account of the Department of Defense so that they can be preserved.
A second statement, of a lawyer from the Department of the Treasury, declared that the Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besent, along with Besent’s chief of cabinet, has retained all the messages that begin with Mike Waltz’s messages on March 15.
Trump and other senior administration officials have minimized the use of the signal to discuss the attack, saying that the classified information was not shared in the chat, despite the exchange, including information on the weapons systems that are used and the time of strikes.
