A federal judge on Thursday ordered that the Trump administration preserve all Signal 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 Guardian reports.
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.
