A federal judge on Thursday ordered that the Trump administration preserve all messages exchanged in the now-infamous Signal group chat in which officials conducted a high-level military operation on the unclassified commercial app and inadvertently included a journalist.
The temporary restraining order from James Boasberg, the chief US district judge in Washington, compelled defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of state Marco Rubio, treasury secretary Scott Bessent, CIA director John Ratcliffe and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to save their texts from 11 to 15 March.
Boasberg made clear that his order was aimed at ensuring no messages from the Signal chat were lost – the group chat was set to automatically delete messages after a certain time period – and not because he decided the Trump administration had done anything wrong.
The disclosure that the Trump administration’s most senior officials were conducting deliberations about a military operation on Signal appalled the national security establishment and prompted fears from freedom of information groups that the communications could be lost.
The existence of the Signal chat erupted into public view after the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, to the text chain in which Hegseth provided details of the operation to strike Houthi rebel targets in Yemen, hours before the attack began.
Hegseth’s messages included a summary of operational details, described as a “team update”, such as the launch times of F-18 fighter jets, the time that the first bombs were expected to drop and when naval Tomahawk missiles would be launched.
Waltz also shared a real-time update (“first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed”), which had the potential to reveal the capabilities and assets the US had in the region.
The Wall Street Journal reported late on Thursday that the information shared by Waltz was supplied by a human source working for Israeli intelligence, and that Israeli officials complained privately to US officials that Waltz’s texts became public.
The lawsuit was brought by the non-profit transparency and watchdog group American Oversight, which accused the officials in the Signal chat of flouting the Federal Records Act, which requires government communications by agency officials to be preserved.
Boasberg is set to decide at a later stage whether the disappearing message function of the Signal chat violated federal records retention laws. American Oversight complained that the discussion in the Signal chat amounted to policy deliberations that needed to be retained.
During a brief federal court hearing before Boasberg in Washington, the Trump administration said the agencies led by the officials in the Signal chat were already taking steps to preserve what they each had. However, it was not immediately known what each agency had individually retained.
In one court filing, the administration’s lawyers at the justice department said one of the participants in the Signal chat, Bessent, had already turned over the version of messages that was on his phone. It also said the defense department had requested a full copy of the chat from Hegseth’s phone.
Separately, the White House instructed this week that the so-called “department of government efficiency” preserve all communications sent over the Signal app in a new “records retention policy”, according to a court filing in an unrelated case, but seemingly in response to the fallout from the Houthi attack group chat.
