 "Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard firmly denied that the messages shared on the Signal group contained classified material in a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Reuters")
As the Signal chat leak scandal hits the United States like a fiery storm, a federal judge on Thursday ordered US President Donald Trump’s government to preserve the messages exchanged in the now-infamous group which was discussing American strikes against Houthis in Yemen.
The order was delivered by James Boasberg, the chief US district judge in Washington. The new ruling now compels Defence 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.
Following the hearing in the case, Boasberg made it clear that he was asking for the messages to be preserved so that no messages from the Signal chat were lost, not because he believed the Trump administration did anything wrong. It is pertinent to note that the famous messaging app automatically deletes messages after a certain period.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by American oversight
The infamous group chat came to 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 about the Houthi strikes.
Some of Hegseth’s messages included a summary of operational details, described as a “team update”. The message included information of launch times of F-18 fighter jets, the time that the first bombs were expected to drop and naval Tomahawk missiles would be launched.
Waltz also shared a real-time update, on the results of the strike, mentioning that one of the Yemeni group’s top guys was killed in the attack. However, a recent Wall Street Journal report suggested Waltz received the information about the top Houthi official from an “Israeli human source” in Yemen.
The case went to the court after a 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 communication agency officials to be preserved.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsBoasberg is set to decide at a later stage whether the disappearing message function of the Signal chat violated the federal record retention laws or not. During the court hearing, the representatives from the Trump administration argued that the agencies led by the officials in the Signal chat are 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. This week, the White House also instructed the so-called “department of government efficiency” to preserve all communications sent over the Signal app in a new “records retention policy”.
With inputs from agencies.