A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to preserve the content of the cat in which the main national security officials used the signal application to discuss military strikes in Yemen because they took place earlier this month.
US district judge James Boasberg ordered senior officials of the cabinet appointed in a trial by the transparency group of the American Oversight government to keep all messages sent and received on signal between March 11 and 15.
Benjamin Sparks, a lawyer representing American surveillance, has raised concerns that “these messages are imminent destruction” due to signal parameters which can be defined to automatically delete messages – which encourages Boasberg judge to order the Trump administration file.
The trial – who appoints the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Director of CIA John Ratcliffe, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the National Archives as defendants – asked a federal judge to immediately declare the signal signal of the messages of the government.
The use of the cat in the signal group was revealed on Monday by the editor -in -chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who declared that he had inadvertently added to the cat as senior national security officials, including Hegseth and the national security advisor Mike Waltz, discussed the military operation.
According to screenshots of signal messages published by the Atlantic, the messages were defined to disappear after a certain calendar. Originally, messages were to disappear after a week. Then, according to screenshots of the messages published by the magazine on March 15 – after Hegseth sent the first operational update – the messages were paid to disappear after four weeks.
Judge Boasberg has for the moment refused to order administration officials to disclose if signal had been used by the Trump administration in a broader context.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to the media when he arrived at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Mini in Honolulu on March 24, 2025.
1st class JOHN Bel / US Indo-Pacific Command
“I don’t think about this stage that it is something I would be ready to order,” he said.
Boasberg earlier this month temporarily blocked the use by Trump of the Extraterrestrial Enemies Act to expel more than 200 alleged gang members in Salvador without regular procedure, bringing the White House to call for its dismissal and publicly attack it as “Democratic activist” and a “radical left”.
In Trump’s heels accusing Boasberg on social networks of “seizing the” Trump affairs “to himself”, the judge began the hearing by providing a detailed description of the DC district tribunal system to allocate business, including how each judge is allocated to “electronic cards” to ensure that business is distributed fairly.
“This is how it works, and this is how all cases continue to be allocated in this course,” said Judge Boasberg.
The lawyers of the Ministry of Defense, before the hearing on Thursday, made a declaration indicating that they asked that a copy of the signal messages in question be sent to an official DOD account so that they can be kept.
A second declaration, a lawyer for the Treasury Department, said that the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as the Bassent chief of staff, kept all messages from Mike Waltz messages on March 15.
Trump and other senior administration officials have minimized the use of the signal to discuss the attack, saying that classified information was not shared in the cat, despite the exchange, including information on the weapons systems used and the time for strikes.
